Half of world’s marine life wiped out in 40 yrs

Pollution, industrial fishing and climate change have killed off half of marine life in the last four decades, according to a WWF report released yesterday.

Species essential to global food supply — especially in poorer nations where fish provide essential dietary protein — were among the hardest hit, the conservation group’s Living Blue Planet Report said.

The family of fish that includes tuna and mackerel, for example, has declined by three quarters since 1970.”In the space of a single generation, human activity has severely damaged the ocean by catching fish faster than they can reproduce,” Marco Lambertini, head of WWF International, said in a statement.

“Profound changes are needed to ensure abundant ocean life for future generations.”Fish are not the only marine organisms in steep decline, the report found. Large swathes of coral reef, mangroves and sea grasses have died off or been hacked away.

This loss has decimated fish populations and, in turn, imperilled some 850 million people who depend directly on these ecosystems for their livelihoods.

Half of all coral has already disappeared, and the rest will vanish by 2050 if temperatures continue to rise at current rates, previous research has shown.”Coral reefs occupy less than one percent of the ocean surface, but they harbour a third of ocean species,” said French biologist Gilles Boeuf, commenting on the report.Doubling previous samplings, the joint WWF and Zoological Society of London analysis tracked 5,829 populations of 1,234 species for an updated, “more troubling” picture of ocean health.

At the same time that the volume of marine life is diminishing, so too is the number of species, both in the ocean and on land, other research has shown. Indeed, scientists believe Earth has entered a sixth “mass extinction event”, with species disappearing 100 times more quickly than only a century or two ago. There have been five such episodes over the last half-billion years, the most recent wiping out all non-avian dinosaurs and most other forms of life some 65 million years ago.

Source:

AFP. Geneva. Available by the Daily Star on http://www.thedailystar.net/world/europe/half-worlds-marine-life-wiped-out-40-yrs-wwf-144418

Posted by admin on Sep 17 2015. Filed under Climate change, News From Roots. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry