Consider too the sharks: apex predators, lords of the food chain,
inspiration for scary stories. A few years ago, I dived off the
coast of Costa Rica in a marine preserve where, supposedly, all
life was protected. Every day, looking down, I saw the sea bottom
carpeted with the corpses of whitetip reef sharks, grotesquely
stripped of their fins by poachers who had slashed them off to
sell to the soup markets of Asia and had cast the living animals
back into the sea to die. Around the world, the numbers of some
shark species have declined as much as 80%. Some may already be
practically extinct; the survivors in the current generation may
be too few to replace themselves.
Modern technology has given us the tools to extinguish entire
fish populations, and because man is a can-do critter, that's
what we're doing. After climbing steadily for the past 50 years,
the worldwide catch of seafood has begun to drop. We're fishing
out the oceans, at the same time that the need for seafood is
soaring. Of the 6 billion of us on the planet, 1 billion rely on
fish as their primary source of protein.
Daily, weapons of mass destruction are deployed in seas the world
over: long lines spanning up to 80 miles, dangling scores of
thousands of baited hooks; enormous nets, nearly invisible in
water. These indiscriminate killers drown everything, including
birds and mammals, that takes the bait or blunders into the mesh.
The unwanted--a quarter of everything caught--is discarded, left to
rot or, sometimes, taken aboard to be ground into meal and
fertilizer.
We know we have already wiped out--and by that I mean driven
nearly to commercial extinction or, in a few cases, the brink of
biological extinction--more than 100 popular species of food fish,
including Nassau groupers, Chilean sea bass, orange roughy and
cod. What we don't know, what we'll never know, is how many
undiscovered species have been eradicated along the way. What
creatures, great and small, might have contained genetic or
chemical secrets that could have saved lives or improved them,
conquered diseases or averted them?
The seas make up 95% of the planet's biosphere--the realm where
all living things exist--and we are stripping and poisoning it,
depriving it of its ability to sustain life. Jacques-Yves
Cousteau once predicted that unless we--not the editorial or royal
we but the universal we--changed our ways and stopped treating the
oceans as an infinite resource and a bottomless dump, there would
someday come a moment of no recovery. Overwhelmed at last, the
resilient seas would no longer be able to cleanse or restock
themselves. From that moment on, the oceans--and with them nearly
all life on earth--would embark upon a slow, irreversible descent
into the darkness.
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mystery
