Word: fish
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...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...
...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...
...models allowed the scientists to test what would happen if whale populations declined. It turned out that whale numbers had little impact on commercial fish populations, in part because the kind of sea life whales like to eat - krill, plankton - is highly unlikely to end up on your dinner plate. "The seafood that people prefer is higher on the food web than [whales' diet]," says Gerber. There's also the undeniable fact that today's whale populations are still just a fraction of what they were in the days when Captain Ahab was (unsuccessfully) whaling, yet commercial fish populations...
...fisheries are in serious trouble, and they're getting worse. In new research presented at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science on Feb. 12, the marine ecologist William Cheung announced that climate change would have a devastating impact on the world's commercial fish and shellfish populations, including tuna, herring and prawns. Fish would flee toward the poles to escape rising temperatures, and many species would all but disappear from their familiar habitats. Many would not survive the transition - Cheung estimated that the Atlantic cod's distribution could drop...
...masse in the sea bottom like a field of slithery reeds, the leafy sea dragon, an animal so peculiar-looking E.T. would feel bad for it, and several sequences of steamy cuttlefish mating. (A child in the screening I attended asked if "that's why they were called cuddle-fish...