Word: ecosystems
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...overview of his current business initiatives, which include DanceJam.com, a web community dedicated to publicizing dance videos, and “BurrellTime” iPhone application that allows his fans to follow his life in real-time. “I’m building my social media ecosystem one peg at a time,” he said. As an entrepreneur with an entertainment background, Burrell said that advertising was instrumental in highlighting artistic talent. “At the end of the day, there are only so many notes, so many rhymes, so many keys on the keyboard...
...recent years the whaling industry has been trying out a different defense - that whale populations need to be culled to reduce their threat to fast-disappearing fish stocks. Whales, after all, eat a lot of seafood, so it would make sense that controlling whale populations would be smart "ecosystem management," as whaling supporters put it. But a new article in the Feb. 13 issue of Science demonstrates that's hardly the case. "Essentially what we found was that...if you remove whales, it has a negligible impact on the biomass that is commercially available for fishing," says Leah Gerber...
...reason is that marine ecosystems and food webs are far more complicated than the one-to-one predator-and-prey relationship we might expect. Analyzing the waters off Western Africa and the Caribbean, where baleen whales breed, Gerber and her colleagues mined marine data to create ecosystem models that plotted the feeding interactions between whales and fish. (They chose these waters in part because Japan is using the fishery argument to persuade Caribbean and African nations to support the lifting of the whaling...
Nevertheless, the reefs are declining because of human activity. A 2008 report by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration concluded that half of the U.S. reef ecosystem is in poor or fair condition and it foresees no improvement in the future. "Reefs all over the world and in the U.S. are suffering," says Dr. Richard Dodge, dean of Nova Southeastern University's Oceanographic Center in Dania Beach, Fla. Vessel-related damage continues to be a big problem, and the two latest incidents are just "one more nail in the coffin...
What makes the latest damage to the reefs so heartbreaking is that the condition of south Florida's reef ecosystem seemed to be improving this year, if ever so slightly. The state seemed to be doing its share to safeguard the natural treasure. Lawmakers, for example, agreed to a long-term timeline to prohibit water utilities from dumping partially-treated sewage into the ocean. Federal and state agencies also finally moved a commercial ship anchorage that had caused years of sustained reef damage off Port Everglades in Fort Lauderdale...