“Ocean’s dying, plankton’s dying… it’s people. Soylent Green is made
out of people. They’re making our food out of people. Next thing they’ll be
breeding us like cattle for food. You’ve gotta tell them. You’ve gotta tell
them!”
It was the dying cry of Charlton Heston in the creepy 1973 film Soylent
Green… and it could resemble our desperate near future.
The ocean is dying, by all accounts – and if so, the food supply along
with it. The causes are numerous, and overlapping. And massive numbers
of wild animal populations are dying as a result of it.
Natural causes in the environment are partly to blame; so too are the
corporations of man; the effects of Fukushima, unleashing untold levels
of radiation into the ocean and onto Pacific shores; the cumulative effect of
modern chemicals and agricultural waste tainting the water and disrupting
reproduction.
A startling new report says in no uncertain terms that the Pacific Ocean
off the California coast is turning into a desert. Once full of life, it is
now becoming barren, and marine mammals, seabirds and fish are starving as a
result. According to Ocean Health:
The waters of the Pacific off the coast of California are a clear,
shimmering blue today, so transparent it’s possible to see the sandy bottom
below […] clear water is a sign that the ocean is turning into a
desert, and the chain reaction that causes that bitter clarity is perhaps
most obvious on the beaches of the Golden State, where thousands of emaciated
sea lion pups are stranded.
[…]
Over the last three years, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration (NOAA) has noticed a growing number of strandings on the
beaches of California and up into the Pacific north-west. In 2013, 1,171 sea
lions were stranded, and 2,700 have already stranded in 2015 – a sign that
something is seriously wrong, as pups don’t normally wind up on their own
until later in the spring and early summer.
“[An unusually large number of sea lions stranding in 2013 was a
red flag] there was a food availability problem even before the ocean got
warm.” Johnson: This has never happened before… It’s
incredible. It’s so unusual, and there’s no really good explanation for it.
There’s also a good chance that the problem will continue, said a
NOAA research scientist in climatology, Nate Mantua.
Experts blame a lack of food due to unusually warm ocean waters. NOAA
declared an El Nino, the weather pattern that warms the Pacific, a few weeks
ago. The water is three and a half to six degrees warmer than the average,
according to Mantua, because of a lack of north wind on the West Coast.
Ordinarily, the north wind drives the current, creating upwelling that brings
forth the nutrients that feed the sardines, anchovies and other fish that
adult sea lions feed on.
Fox News added:
The warm water is likely pushing prime sea lion foods — market squid,
sardines and anchovies — further north, forcing the mothers to abandon their
pups for up to eight days at a time in search of sustenance.
The pups, scientists believe, are weaning themselves early out of
desperation and setting out on their own despite being underweight and
ill-prepared to hunt.
[…]
“These animals are coming in really desperate. They’re at the end
of life. They’re in a crisis … and not all animals are going to make it,”
said Keith A. Matassa, executive director at the Pacific Marine Mammal
Center, which is currently rehabilitating 115 sea lion pups.
The same is true of seabirds on the Washington State coast:
In the storm debris littering a Washington State shoreline, Bonnie Wood
saw something grisly: the mangled bodies of dozens of scraggly young
seabirds. Walking half a mile along the beach at Twin Harbors State Park on
Wednesday, Wood spotted more than 130 carcasses of juvenile Cassin’s
auklets—the blue-footed, palm-size victims of what is becoming one of the
largest mass die-offs of seabirds ever recorded. “It was so distressing,”
recalled Wood, a volunteer who patrols Pacific Northwest beaches looking for
dead or stranded birds. “They were just everywhere. Every ten yards we’d find
another ten bodies of these sweet little things.”
“This is just massive, massive, unprecedented,” said Julia Parrish, a
University of Washington seabird ecologist who oversees the Coastal
Observation and Seabird Survey Team (COASST), a program that has tracked West
Coast seabird deaths for almost 20 years. “We may be talking about 50,000 to
100,000 deaths. So far.” (source)
100,000 doesn’t necessarily sound large, statistically speaking, but
precedent in the history of recorded animal deaths suggests that it is, in
fact massive. Even National Geographic is noting that these die off events
are “unprecedented.” Warmer water is indicated for much of the starvation
faced by many of the dead animals.
Last year, scientists sounded the alarm over the death of millions of star
fish, blamed on warmer waters and ‘mystery virus':
Starfish are dying by the millions up and down the West Coast, leading
scientists to warn of the possibility of localized extinction of some
species. As the disease spreads, researchers may be zeroing in on a link
between warming waters and the rising starfish body count. (source)
[…]
The epidemic, which threatens to reshape the coastal food web and
change the makeup of tide pools for years to come, appears to be driven by a
previously unidentified virus, a team of more than a dozen
researchers from Cornell University, UC Santa Cruz, the Monterey Bay Aquarium
and other institutions reported Monday. (source)
Changing temperatures in the Pacific Ocean, driven by the natural cycle of
gyres over decades, shifts wildlife populations, decimating the populations
of species throughout the food chain, proving how fragile the balance of life
in the ocean really is.
Recently, the collapse of the sardine population has created a crisis
for fisheries and marine wildlife alike on the West Coast:
Commercial fishing for sardines off of Canada’s West Coast is worth an
estimated $32 million – but now they are suddenly gone. Back in October, fisherman
reported that they came back empty-handed without a single fish after 12
hours of trolling and some $1000 spent on fuel.
Sandy Mazza, for the Daily Breeze, reported a similar phenomenon in
central California: “[T]he fickle sardines have been so abundant for so many
years – sometimes holding court as the most plentiful fish in coastal waters
– that it was a shock when he couldn’t find one of the shiny silver-blue
coastal fish all summer, even though this isn’t the first time they’ve
vanished.” [emphasis added]
[…]
“Is it El Nino? Pacific Decadal Oscillation? [La] Nina? Long-term climate
change? More marine mammals eating sardines? Did they all go to Mexico or
farther offshore? We don’t know. We’re pretty sure the overall population has
declined. We manage them pretty conservatively because we don’t want to end
up with another Cannery Row so, as the population declines, we curb fishing.”
said National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) official Kerry
Griffin. (source)
According to a report in the Daily Mail, the worst events have wiped out
90% of animal populations, falling short of extinction, but creating a
rupture in food chains and ecosystems.
And environmental factors are known to be a factor, with pollution from
chemicals dumped by factories clearly tied to at least 20% of the mass
die off events of wildlife populations that have been investigated, and many
die offs implicated by a number of overlapping factors. The Daily Mail reported:
Mass die-offs of certain animals has increased in frequency every year for
seven decades, according to a new study.
Researchers found that such events, which can kill more than 90 per cent
of a population, are increasing among birds, fish and marine invertebrates.
The reasons for the die-offs are diverse, with effects tied to humans such
as environmental contamination accounting for about a fifth of them.
Farm runoff from Big Agra introduces high levels of fertilizers and
pesticides which create oxygen-starved dead zones which fish and aquatic live is
killed off. Also preset in agriculture waste are gender bending chemicals
like those found in Atrazine, used in staple crop production, and antibiotics
and hormones, used in livestock production, which creates hazardous runoff
for fish populations:
Livestock excrete natural hormones – estrogens and testosterones – as well
as synthetic ones used to bolster their growth. Depending on concentrations
and fish sensitivity, these hormones and hormone mimics might impair wild
fish reproduction or skew their sex ratios. (source)
Pharmaceutical contaminants are also to blame for changing the sex of fish
and disrupting population numbers, while a study found that the chemicals in
Prozac changed the behavior of marine life, and made shrimp
many times more likely to “commit suicide” and swim towards the light
where they became easy prey.
Fish farms also introduce a large volume of antibiotic and chemical pollution
into oceans and waterways:
The close quarters where farmed fish are raised (combined with their
unnatural diets) means disease occurs often and can spread quickly. On fish
farms, which are basically “CAFOs of the sea,” antibiotics are dispersed into
the water, and sometimes injected directly into the fish.
Unfortunately, farmed fish are often raised in pens in the ocean, which
means not only that pathogens can spread like wildfire and contaminate any
wild fish swimming past – but the antibiotics can also spread to wild fish
(via aquaculture and wastewater runoff) – and that’s exactly what recent
research revealed. (source)
Mass die offs of fish on the Brazilian coastline have linked to pollution from the
dumping of raw sewage and garbage.
In the last few days it was reported that a massive die off of bottlenose dolphins in the Gulf of
Mexico was connected by researchers to BP’s Deep Water Horizon oil spill.
Evidence was found in a third of the cases of lesions in the adrenal gland,
an otherwise rare condition linked with petroleum exposure. More than a fifth
of the dolphins also suffered bacterial pneumonia, causing deadly lung
infection that is likewise rarely seen in dolphin populations.
