Our removal of so many active, living sea animals has unexpectedly impaired the very nutrient cycling engine of the marine ecosystem itself, because every living, moving sea creature always helped to stabilize and energize the whole system. The incredible bulk of marine animal life that existed a few centuries ago is now gone. And by its removal the ocean web itself has been injured, virtually gutted by fishing. According to accepted scientific theory, that was never supposed to happen. But it has, and the evidence is everywhere.
I grew up in a little fishing village on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean in Nova Scotia, and I have a pretty clear memory of life along the shoreline back to the early 60s. I have been very close to the fishing industry, and I have been very close to the ocean itself for 50 years. Concerned by changes in the sea life at my doorstep, I have closely monitored scientific research coming out of Canada’s Department of Fisheries and Oceans for the past decade. My conclusion: we are in much worse trouble than the DFO is willing to admit, and the DFO is sitting on information that has global significance.
The best way to describe the change in my lifetime is a decline in everything. There has been a major decline in large ocean animals, including fish; this much is fairly well known. However, it is important to realize that you can scale this observation down as well; there are now no large snails, there are no large mussels, there are not really even large seaweeds like there once were. Plants and animals that flourish now tend to be smaller, fine and fuzzy – lower energy things, that are more efficient and adapted for low nutrient feeding.
Food production in the ocean has slowed overall, and this is reflected in the condition of the few large fish still surviving. All are unusually small and thin today. Tuna, swordfish, cod, you name it, that is the reality. I see a whole ocean system downshift; where I can watch plankton-feeding barnacles and mussels declining here in Nova Scotia, I see a parallel in the die-off of plankton-feeding corals in the tropics.
What does this mean? It means there has been a slow-down in overall productivity and energy flow into the ocean, which means photosynthesis and carbon dioxide uptake by the ocean has also slowed over time. Do all these signs today mean humans have actually damaged the ability of the ocean to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by fishing and whaling? That is my conclusion, although it is not generally accepted. But to me it is obvious that an ocean dominated by bacteria and other microbes (i.e. where we are heading) cannot stimulate plant growth as fast as can an ocean dominated by animals (i.e. what the earth had prior to human fishing).
When I look at the seaweed, the large traditional weeds appear under-fertilized, like they’re not getting enough nitrogen. That helps tell the tale. I try to read everything the DFO scientists and others publish on this area, and I have been watching for the ocean biochemistry to change. And in fact, it has changed.
If you dig through DFO’s biochemical papers and observations, you will find in Atlantic Canada that the nitrate (a very significant part of the natural fertility of the sea) has decreased throughout the water column, not just on the top layer. And that is an ominous sign. A decline in bottom water nitrate is a clear indication of a loss of plant growth potential, even using the standard interpretation of how these things work.
Many people are scratching their heads now over what we can do to get the ocean to suck up more carbon from the atmosphere and lock it away at the bottom. One suggestion is iron fertilization. There are areas of the open ocean where the limiting ingredient for plant growth is iron: sprinkling iron dust in those areas will stimulate a plankton bloom, and that plankton bloom will take in some carbon. The idea is that the carbon will then make its way to the bottom of the ocean by sinking or by being eaten. Deep ocean water overturns very slowly so the carbon would be kept down there for a few centuries before natural currents bring it back up.
But iron fertilization is a poor idea because we cannot predict the full ecological impact. It might be useless or it might be dangerous. We don’t know, once we stimulate an unnatural plankton bloom with iron dust, if it will be toxic to animal life or if it might end up rotting and removing oxygen from the bottom water. Iron fertilization could backfire.
Fertilization of the ocean is definitely a major key to removing more carbon from the atmosphere – the ocean is the biggest thing on the planet capable of taking in carbon. Fertility of the ocean is crucial, and, although science has been slow to acknowledge it, living fish, whales, seals and seabirds all naturally speed up the fertility of the ocean, essentially by their very active movement. The web of marine animals has always been self-fertilizing!
This realization shows us that the ‘sea animal deficit’ we have caused has inevitably caused a natural ‘ocean fertility deficit’. If we now leave marine animals alone, the ocean animal web will have a natural tendency to repair itself; a natural tendency to rebuild and accelerate fertility on its own. Maximizing the living presence sea animals on the planet, including as many as possible of the larger types, will produce the best result, ocean-fertility wise. The safest way for humans to get the ocean to lock more carbon away will therefore be to stop all fishing, whaling and seal hunting. The idea is politically unpopular, to say the least, but it would help turn the ocean around.
The fishing industry currently admits that it must deal with the direct impacts of fishing that people can see and understand. Fishermen will have to stop bottom-trawling, catching things that they aren’t targeting, killing turtles and dolphins, birds and juvenile fish. However, what the industry cannot or will not square with is the mounting scientific evidence of damaging indirect effects of fishing: the energy draining impact on the ecosystem overall.
Life is now precarious for large sea animals in general. Beyond food shortages, microbes are becoming more dominant in the environment, raising threats to animals from toxic algae blooms, dead zones and rising infectious diseases. These changes have the potential to take down some of the larger animals quickly. I do not expect to see a long, slow, gradual disappearance for some of these species; whales and seals, for instance, might just crash.
Sea turtles, extremely old species that survived the extinction of the dinosaurs, are now coming ashore sick and starving. That should give us cause to worry. The system overall is ailing and it is time to face up to what we’ve done to it.
I don’t have a vegetarian or vegan philosophical agenda, but it makes sense to shift in that direction. We should stop killing sea animals across the board, and we should stop doing things that feed bacteria in the sea, which is what we do with pollution. If we want ‘sustainable’ fish protein in our diet, we should develop smart aquaculture. There are now no ‘sustainable’ ocean fisheries.
Ocean animals as a group should be given free rein to try to pull themselves back from the brink of human-induced annihilation, and to re-charge the fertility of the sea. This will also be key to long term human survival.
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For more on these ideas, visit my website, www.fisherycrisis.com [1]
