Word: plankton
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Only a couple of years after these events, a Komsomol expedition brought back photographs showing the massive destruction of Baikal's fish and plankton caused by toxic wastes. No accidental discharges had been logged. As always, everything was fine on paper...
...view from the hilltop, overlooking McMurdo Sound on the eastern side of Antarctica, is deceiving. A closer look at the seemingly lifeless land- and seascape reveals an amazing abundance of life. Like most of the coastal waters around the continent, McMurdo Sound is filled with plankton and fish, and its thick ice is perforated by the breathing holes of Weddell seals. Nearby Cape Royds is home to thousands of Adelie penguins, which hatch their eggs in the world's southernmost rookery. Skuas -- seagull-like scavenger birds -- scout the breathing holes and the margins between sea ice and land, seeking seal...
Early on, the Fisherman pays his respects to the food chain: "It takes 50 pounds of silversides to produce a five-pound blue. It takes 500 pounds of plankton to produce those silversides. It takes 5,000 pounds of microscopic sea plants to produce those plankton animals . . . 'All flesh is grass.' " Yet there is not an ounce of false sentiment in his speeches: "It probably doesn't make sense to talk about pain in a fish . . . an angler who had caught a perch told of finding himself unable to remove the hook without taking one of the fish's eyes...
...late parents' retirement home in a tiny coastal village in Cornwall. He settles there because he has nowhere else to go, but he looks seaward and makes odious comparisons: "In Bom Porto, the Atlantic was milky green, thick as soup. At this time of year it swarmed with plankton, and in certain lights you seemed to see the sea wriggle with life. It was easy to imagine the first things crawling out of it and starting in on their colonial adventure. This northern sea was different, more coldly sophisticated. If you thought about the things that came...
...million tons of anchovies, a fifth of the world's total fish catch. Now, the warm equatorial water is blocking the upwelling of nutrients from the sea bottom. The result is economic disaster. The anchovies are largely gone. Coastal waters have turned into a sludge of rotting plankton and fish. Sea birds, whose droppings (guano) are an important source of fertilizer, are dying off for lack of food. When the last severe El Niño struck in 1972, the reduced catch of the cheap anchovies raised poultry prices in the U.S. by more than...