Humans have broken the sacred law of the ocean and disturbed the waters and the life inside it with industrial fishing.
Wired originally published this fragment which is now being reproduced following the Climate Desk collaboration. This was the fragment:
“On the Ninth of November, 1969, we saw a hearty departure in the Halifax Harbour in Nova Scotia when the CSS Hudson slipped through into the wild open ocean. This research vessel was thought to be the last glorious voyage of many marine scientists. This was the first recorded circumnavigation of American land.
The original plan was that the mighty Hudson would frequently stop for the scientists to carry on with their research and sample collections. One among them was a marine ecologist at Bedford Institute of Oceanography – Ray Sheldon. His main fascination on this trip was the microscopic plankton scattered everywhere around the ocean. He wanted to know how far these planktons were spread. Sheldon volunteered with some colleagues, and they hauled buckets of seawater and took them to Hudson’s library. They also used a plankton-counting device to calculate the total size and number of planktons they found in the water.
All those scientists reached an inevitable conclusion following simple mathematics: An organism's body size determines how abundant they are in the ocean. The smaller the organism, the more chances you find them. An excellent example of this research is the Krill which is a billion times tinier than tuna, but they are also a billion times more found in the ocean than tuna.”
But the latest developments over the last hundred years have debunked this law. Industrial fishing has ruined Sheldon’s spectrum as the numbers of larger marine creatures are becoming lower each day.
Galbraith and some other scientists compared today’s reading of microscopic marine animals and the readings of Sheldon’s, and they both were still quite similar.
The conclusion is that the biomass of fish larger than ten grams has and other mammals have shrunk since 1800, but the smaller ones are still there.
