New 2009 Update
Hey guys. Happy 2009 :] Sorry that you haven't seen us around online in a while. With college apps and a bunch (more like a ton) of other stuff going on, we've been pretty busy. Anyway, just a small bunch of updates. Yes, Ocean Skeleton is planning on continuing their awesome ocean conservation saga.
So first off,
congratulations to Joseph (the guy with the shark avatar), he got accepted
early decision to
Brown University!!! :D
Secondly, the Ocean Skeleton (this very blog you're reading)
won second place in the
Young Marine Biologist Award 2008 Blog Competition hosted by International Year of the Reef. How cool is that?
The first place winner,
this blog here, did a really good job too :] Pretty spiffy.
Thirdly, I've been working on a
CNY project... and as you know. CNY is coming up (Happy Year of the Ox). So I don't want to reveal any details about it yet but I'll be sure to (I promise!) keep the blog updated about it. I will say it has something to do with shark fin soup. We'll see how it goes.
Quick Update
Just a quick list of posts that might be written in the future:
Hanauma Bay (Oahu, Hawaii) Case Study
Coral Bleaching
Environmental implications of the next US election
More news updates
Current initiatives/projects around the world
Yes, even though this blog was created to enter in the YMBA 2008 blog competition, my team member and I have decided to continue the blog even after the competition ends.
As of right now The Ocean Skeleton has over 30 posts which were all created in the time span of 2 weeks.
Thanks a lot, Hollywood.
With the proliferation of movies such as Jaws and the typical James Bond fight scene with sharks, it’s no wonder we see sharks as vicious beasts, lying in wait to take chunks out of our flesh. This assumption could be no further than the truth. In fact, most sharks aren’t suited to hunting prey as big as humans and are more afraid of us than we are of them. After all, we kill 100 million sharks a year for shark’s fin soup and other uses. Sharks, on the other hand, kill six to ten people a year, much, much less than the amount of people killed yearly by lightning. The only reasons that sharks would attack humans are because they occasionally mistake us for their prey or they feel threatened by us.
The number one victims of shark bites are shark fishermen. It should be obvious that they’re not hunting humans; they’re fighting for their lives as they get dragged out of the water and viciously have their fins cut off. The U.S. National Parks Association states that being attacked by a shark is extremely rare and goes on to state that if you want to practice safety, the number one tip is to not carry dead fish with you because the shark would want to eat it. Another tip was to not try to touch or ride the sharks as that might scare them into attacking. It is fairly obvious that they’re not vicious human-hunters. In fact, the National Parks Association says that most species of sharks attack humans only when they mistake them for seals and sea lions, which happens very rarely due to sharks’ incredible sense of smell and ability to detect electrical fields.
So, sharks are not monsters and do not actively prey on humans. In fact, it is the other way around.
Every year humans kill 100 million sharks. We kill them for shark’s fin soup, which can sell for 100 US dollars a bowl in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore. We kill them for sport, and we kill them by accident while fishing for other aquatic life. By far the worst are the shark finners. They catch the sharks, pull them out of the water, cut their fins off, and then dump them back in the water where the sharks sink to the bottom and suffocate (most species of sharks need to be able to move to breathe, as they have no way to push water across their gill surfaces). Even if they didn’t suffocate, they would starve from not being able to move and eat.
We cannot keep fishing 100 million sharks per year out of the ocean. Sharks are not your typical fish. Sharks only reach adulthood at the age of 20 years, so they rarely produce offspring before then. Given their long reproduction time, they can’t recover anywhere near as fast as we are killing them. Furthermore, as top predators they control the top of the food chain, without them there would be effects on the lower levels of the food chain, the fish they eat would have less constraints on their population, and would then affect the level below them. This would continue on through all levels of the food chain. For example, without sharks, perhaps the numbers of fish on coral reefs would increase a drastic amount. Then, instead of eating bacteria or algae, the increased population of fish may resort to eating coral polyps. We are not sure of the effects yet, but by removing the top predator in an ecosystem, it would be like removing lions and cheetahs from an ecosystem. All the grazing animals that they ate would no longer be eaten, so there would be more of them, and they could overgraze the land and cause desertification. Scientists hypothesize this is what could happen to the oceans and plankton (the “grass” of the sea) were sharks to disappear.
Furthermore, regarding the actual shark fin soup, the flavor doesn’t even come from the shark’s fin. Shark fin is made out of cartilage, which has no taste. The flavor instead comes from chicken stock or other meat. The eating of shark’s fin comes with the common misconception that it prevents cancer because sharks don’t get cancer. That could not be further from the truth. Sharks do suffer from cancer just as humans do, and, as top predators, sharks actually have high concentrations of toxins (like mercury) resulting from human pollution in their bodies because they eat many other fish contaminated by these toxins. Not only does shark’s fin NOT prevent cancer, in fact, it is more likely to INCREASE the toxins in your system.
Sharks are not dangerous to humans and are a key part of ocean ecosystems. They cannot recover from the way we are massacring them and they must be protected.
[Image taken from
here.]
Did You Know?
This post is more like an added supplement to the
"Threats" post.
- One cigarette butt that enters the ocean contaminates one gallon of water forever.
- Scientists predict that 70% of the world’s coral reefs may well be destroyed over the next 20-40 years, unless we stop cyanide fishing, pollution, sewage, erosion and clumsy tourism.
- Top 3 threats: Overfishing, global warming, pollution
(here's an interesting article on overfishing here)
- Since 1986, most coral reefs in Singapore have lost up to 65% of their live coral cover. Visibility also dropped from 10m in the 1960s to 2m or less today.
- Reclamation is one of the biggest problems to coral reefs in Singapore.
- Currently, no national policy or specified agency exists to manage coral reefs in Singapore. (There are, however, "strong measures and consistent monitoring of effluents throughout the nation help to curtail risks from marine pollution").
Yes, I have
posted this graph up before: (Joseph and I question the "sedimentation" column. The turbidity of water is questionable in Singapore. We believe sedimentation does play a major part in Singapore.)
By the way, the graph is there to show readers that reefs in Singapore are under major risks and it looks like it is mostly due to coastal development and shipping.
Our original threats to the coral reef post:
Click here
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch
In between California and Japan, just north of Hawaii, there is an area of the sea that the rotating current from Japan to California and back winds up in. This causes a huge portion of the debris that flows into the oceans to arrive in this patch. There are more than 6 of these garbage dumps in our oceans.
It is estimated that the surface area of the Great Pacific Garbage dump is only slightly smaller than Africa, and that this only amounts to the plastic on the surface. A great deal more plastic gets covered by enough algae and barnacles to sink. In 1998, Charles Moore of the Angalita Marine Research Foundation took samples of the surface and found that on the surface, there was 6 times as much plastic as there was plankton.
Furthermore, tiny plastic pellets known as nurdles, which are used in the plastic manufacturing process, have the unfortunate resemblance to krill and fish eggs which results in them being eaten by fish and seabirds. This becomes a problem because plastics collect toxins
Studies done have shown that free-floating plastics in the ocean act like sponges and magnets for toxins. Many chemicals that we dump into the ocean, on purpose or by accident, readily stick to the surfaces of free-floating plastic. The measurement results stated that in many cases, the surfaces of plastic had one million times the amount of chemical concentrated on their surface than the surrounding water had. When animals consume these pellets, they are consuming all of the chemical that goes along with them.
Even though it is more expensive to do so, we must recycle all the plastic we can and try to avoid using plastic whenever possible. The best estimates say that plastics will take hundreds of thousands of years to biodegrade, so we have to avoid allowing plastic to escape our hands into the environment. Hopefully one day we have the technology to pull all of this trash out of our seas.
[Picture from lolcats].
Information gathered for this post was taken once again from
Alan Weisman's The World Without Us.
The chapter where we got our information for this post is chapter Chapter 9: Polymers are Forever.
Here's the Amazon page:
Click here
Ooh... progress for the GBR?
A short article, yes, but it has news of progress.
Earlier on, I wrote
an article about Australia's Great Barrier Reef and how it may not survive the next 30 years. Well, it looks like some change is taking place.
According to this article, Australia's environment minister, Peter Garrett, is taking matters into his own hands. He's temporarily stopped a tourist development (called Reef Cove Resort) in north Queensland because of claims that sediment run-off will damage the Reef.
[Quote] "There can't be any construction at the site until I'm satisfied that the developer appropriate remediation work and could complete the construction of this development in a responsible manner in full compliance with the approval conditions without any impact on the marine environment and the Great Barrier Reef itself," Mr Garrett said.
Apparently, Reef Cove Resort is looking for legal advice in regards to this matter now.
Go Mr. Garrett! :D
Other articles about Mr. Garrett's awesomeness:
A news article about him blocking a coal plan.
His Wikipedia page.
His website.
