One of the wonders of marine biology is that the oceans still host megafauna with a size distribution similar to what it was in the pleistocene, while here on land there are hardly any big animals left, thanks to the relentless destruction caused by a certain species known as Homo sapiens.
In recent decades, large whale species have been pulled back from the brink of being hunted to extinction, but large parts of the marine fauna could again be at risk if industrialisation and overexploitation of the marine environment continues. Essentially, we can still avoid doing to the oceans what we did to the land, but the time to change our ways is right about now.
This is the gist of my latest feature which appeared in Current Biology today:
Can we avert marine mass extinctions?
Current Biology Volume 25, Issue 6 March 16, 2015
Open access
A whale shark (Photo: Zac Wolf/Wikipedia.)
No comments:
Post a Comment