Word: speciesism
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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You don't have to be a marine biologist to understand the importance of corals - just ask any diver. The tiny underwater creatures are the architects of the beautiful, electric-colored coral reefs that lie in shallow tropical waters around the world. Divers swarm to them not merely for their...
Unfortunately, that's exactly what appears to be happening around the world. According to a comprehensive survey by the Global Marine Species Assessment (GMSA) published Thursday in Science, one-third of the more than 700 species of reef-building corals are threatened with extinction. Compare that to a decade ago...
The causes of the coral's demise are manifold, but they all come back to one culprit: us. Overfishing - especially the kind that uses dynamite or poison to kill whole schools of fish - destroys the coral directly, while polluted runoff from agriculture simply chokes them. Development in booming coastal economies...
In one way, protecting the coral is not that different from protecting any endangered species. First, we need to cut back on activities that ruin their habitat, the shallow waters close to our coast. Agricultural runoff - already responsible for the oceanic "dead zones" seen in the Gulf of Mexico and...
And South Florida is having an ecological and hydrological meltdown, the legacy of a century of plumbing and dredging and growing without much thinking. The Everglades ecosystem now hosts 69 threatened or endangered species, and its rookeries and fisheries have crashed. Massive algal blooms are turning Florida Bay into pea...