We’re witnessing the disappearance of large organisms and the increasing ascendancy of small invertebrates and microbes throughout the coastal ocean. We don’t know how easy it is to reverse the process, assuming we have the will to do it."
Check your food chains. An abundance of small invertebrates and microbes (food) will lead to an abundance of 'higher' predators. As food is easier to obtain, reproduction and survival rates for predators increase. It's seen all the time in nature.....cycles for rabbits and bobcats mirror each other, for instance.
He points to ship logs from Christopher Columbus’s voyages, describing Caribbean waters so abundant with green turtles that crewmen feared their vessels might run aground on the turtles’ backs
Anecdotal evidence. I would wonder about any exaggeration, as well. In my own circumstance, for instance, stories about my fishing trips, the casual observer would think that massive trout were so commonplace that I could scoop them out of the water with my bare hands. I rarely talk about all of the fishing trips that I got skunked.
Jackson to calculate a "conservative" estimate of the 30- to 50-million giant green turtles thriving in the Caribbean during the 1600s. "With each turtle weighing 100 to 200 kilograms (200 to 400 pounds), that’s more biomass than all the large animals in East Africa," Jackson observed."
This statistic is utterly meaningless. It's just a large impressive number. That's all. Read 'How to Lie With Statistics'. It's a real eye-opener.
Personally, I am willing to discuss environmental topics, but only facts, not wild guesses.
Read 'How to Lie With Statistics'. It's a real eye-opener.
I'll second that recommendation - the book was written near 1950, but is chock full of examples of how to misrepresent data using statistics, and is very readable for the math challenged.
Now, how about some pix of these massive trout you're talking about? :-)
FRegards, PrairieDawg
What you say is true in closed systems. However, an outside agent in the form of humans is removing the predators, leading to exactly what the article mentions, a glut of prey species. Instead of rabbits and bobcats, think deer and North American predators; without as many as there used to be, the deer population has soared enough to become a dangerous nuisance.
Will too many microbes and small invertebrates become a problem? Perhaps an overabundance could cause a die-off and ocean dead zones. Who knows? Not me, since I'm not a biologist. But what will happen is, at the rate things are headed, someday we'll all be stuck eating tilapia, instead of tuna.
LTS
The problem is, the higher predators have been drastically reduced and even the next trophic level down (species like menhaden) are being significantly depleted.