Oceanographers calls for immediate action as global warming, over-fishing
and pollution threaten the world's marine life.


WASHINGTON, DC, UNITED STATES REUTERS -
After years of exhaustive research there is now little disagreement
between scientists and fishermen; the world's fish stocks are disappearing.
Tuna, cod, and swordfish among other species have been fished to capacity in
many of the world's oceans and several others, like Britain's Common Skate,
are now extinct. According to scientists, 90 percent of the world's big marine
predator fish have been fished out, the victims in a vicious cycle which has
seen the global seafood catch steadily falling since the 1980s.

For marine scientists like Dr Jeremy Jackson from the Scripps
Institution of Oceanography, the situation is dire. He'll tell anyone who'll
listen that a combination of industrial-scale over-fishing, climate change and
man-made pollution is destroying the world's ocean life. He and his colleagues
at the global environmental group Oceana, say the world's oceans are in
desperate need of a government bail-out.

"Compared to twenty-five years ago the state of the world's oceans
is really quite grim because a great many processes that have been in place
for a long time, have ratcheted up with the growth of consumption and the
growth of human population."

Over-fishing has been a problem for more than fifty years, but Jackson
says that today "the scale of it is monumental by comparison".
New methods of catching fish have strained fish populations to the
point of collapse. According to the Monterey Bay Aquarium in California, ocean
fishermen increased their catch by 400 percent between 1950 and 1994 by
doubling the size of their fleets and developing increasingly efficient nets.

Today, environmentalists point to the use of so-called bottom trawl
fishing as the most destructive fishing practice on the high seas. Bottom
trawling takes place with massive nets weighted to drag along the ocean floor.
While the nets succeed in picking up the target fish, they also lay waste to
coral beds and all deep sea habitats in their path. Commercially, however,
bottom trawling is a profitable enterprise and while there's money to be made,
Oceana's Chief Scientists Michael Hirshfield says, the fishing industry is
reluctant to stop it.

"There's a new kind of fish that somebody wants to catch,
fishermen are extremely clever, they figure out a way to catch it, they go out
and catch them and only after the fishermen start noticing there aren't as
many as there used to be does government wake up and say 'Hey maybe somebody
needs to do something".

The other major factor contributing to the loss of fish, is the
destruction of habitat through man-made pollution. Low oxygen dead-zones
created by toxic run-off from land-based farms and industries, have doubled in
number every decade since the 1970s, smothering ecosystems around the
world.

There are now more than 400 dead zones world-wide. The Black, Caspian
and Baltic Seas all show massive discolouration where dead zones exist. An
enormous dead zone off the Louisiana coast is the result of fertilisers being
washed into the Mississippi River from poultry farms up-stream. Nitrogen and
phosphorous contained in the fertiliser, feed algae which grow to unnaturally
large populations as a result. The algae growth starves the surrounding water
of oxygen, the food chain is altered and fish that once thrived there, can no
longer survive.

Dr Jeremy Jackson says the proliferation of dead zones is at least as
serious as over-fishing.

"Twenty years from now I can imagine a world with global dead
zones surrounding all the major continents with a paucity of oxygen
throughout those areas, no decent fish to eat and the ocean turning into
Coca-cola because of this frightening prospect of the lowering of the
pH". says Jackson. "It's hard to imagine what would be there that we
would want to use or enjoy."

And then there is the over-arching 21st century problem of global
warming.

Environmental groups say the world has lost nearly one-fifth of it's
coral reefs because of global warming and rising ocean temperatures. The
phenomenon has raised surface water temperatures to the point where coral, in
a natural attempt to defend itself against the affects of heated water,
self-destructs through a process known as bleaching. The death of the coral
leads in turn to the destruction of life that depends on the coral for
survival.

With no real short-term remedies to global warming available,
scientists believe climate change may pose the greatest threat of all,
although Oceana's Dr Michael Hirshfield says there is still a chance to save
what's left.

"I think that it's terribly, terribly important for those of us
who see what's going on in the oceans to speak up about it and even if we may
not be able to return the oceans to the condition that I knew and my
colleagues knew 30 years ago, 40 years ago, we can work hard to preserve
enough of the functioning elements of ocean ecosystems so that they survive
climate change, so that they can have the resilience to go on providing many
of the things that we've come to depend on them for", says
Hirshfield.

Ocean scientists argue that commercial, governmental and environmental
interests can work together in protecting the long-term health of the world's
oceans. They point to successes in restoring rivers and lakes in many parts of
the world in recent decades and say the same lessons can be applied to the
oceans. All that is required, they say, is a global will to act.