Further Declines in Biodiversity for the 21st Century

Biodiversity will continue to decline during the 21st century if business continues as usual. according to a new study published online for the journal Science , which includes Rashid Sumaila and former Sea Around Us Project members William Cheung and Sylvie Guenette as co-authors, and was timed with the COP-10 meeting on Biodiversity in Nagoya, Japan. Conservation efforts have slowed declines; the paper predicated the rate of decline in vertebrates would have been at least one-fifth higher in their absence.  But they are not sufficient so far. The team also showed that declines could be further slowed if fundamental changes are implemented, such stopping the current practice of providing harmful subsidies that result in the over-exploitation of biological resources.

Reference: Henrique M. Pereira, Paul W. Leadley, Vânia Proença, Rob Alkemade, Jörn P. W. Scharlemann, Juan F. Fernandez-Manjarrés, Miguel B. Araújo, Patricia Balvanera, Reinette Biggs, William W. L. Cheung, Louise Chini, H. David Cooper, Eric L. Gilman, Sylvie Guénette, George C. Hurtt, Henry P. Huntington, Georgina M. Mace, Thierry Oberdorff, Carmen Revenga, Patrícia Rodrigues, Robert J. Scholes, Ussif Rashid Sumaila, Matt Walpole (2010) Scenarios for Global Biodiversity in the 21st Century Science .

Jellyfish as the Catch du Jour

The global catch of jellyfish is now at more than 250,000 tonnes of tentacles every year. However, researchers like the Sea Around Us Project‘s Lucas Brotz, are still trying to figure out if there has been a rise of jellyfish globally. Brotz is using anecdotal information of jellyfish accounts through time to build a global model and he is seeing evidence of population increases but is not yet prepared to say if they are significant, which is mentioned in a recent article at Livescience asking if jellyfish are menaces or misunderstood. His work was also recently mentioned and in a story at edible Vancouver, exploring the jellyfish as the next catch du jour.

Collaboration with National Geographic on ‘Seafood Print’

We should be thinking about seafood consumption in terms of the type of fish we eat (predatory vs. forage fish) rather than simply by weight. Enter the seafood print — or the oceanic primary production required to generate a specific fisheries catch — featured this month in Paul Greenberg’s article for National Geographic titled Time for a Sea Change. The work is done by the Sea Around Us Project scientists in collaboration with National Geographic fellow Enric Sala; more details and methods are here. The top three largest seafood prints are made by China, Japan and the U.S. The Washington Post has covered the findings as well as the AFP. More results are to come as part of a scientific contribution, currently under review.

How Much Is that MPA in the Ocean?

Dr. Ashley McCrea-Strub, a post-doc with the Sea Around Us Project, is lead author of a study quantifying the costs of establishing marine protected areas, finding that managers have spent a wide ranging $41 – $1.1 million per square kilometer to get new reserves up and running. Studies have been done in the past that look at costs of running MPAs (such as this by 2010 article Cullis-Suzuki & Pauly) but this is the first attempt to quantify the cost of establishing MPAs in the first place. For more on McCrea-Strub’s work, read popular coverage of the work at Conservation Magazine or the full article at Marine Policy.