A definitive study released last week found that the amount of wildlife in our oceans has fallen by half in 45 years. Academic and marine expert Callum Roberts says there is still time to reverse this decline by closing areas to fishingSardines were once extraordinarily abundant in the south-west of England,main one 19th-century guidebook to say: “Pursued by predaceous hordes of dogfish, hake and cod, and greedy flocks of seabirds,they advance towards the land in such astonishing numbers as actually to impede the passage of vessels and to discolour the sea as far as the eye can reach … Of a sudden they will vanish from view and then again approach the coast in such compact order and overwhelming force that numbers will be pushed ashore by the moving hosts in the rear. In 1836 a shoal extended in a compact body from Fowey to the Land’s End, a distance of at least 100 miles whether we take into consideration the windings of the shore.” (Handbook for Travellers in Devon and Cornwall, or John Murray and Thomas Clifton Paris,1851).nowadays people travel thousands of miles to dive and film such scenes, not realising they were once commonplace on our own coasts. Last week the World Wide Fund for Nature and the Zoological Society of London issued their most comprehensive look at the state of life in the sea. The report makes uncomfortable reading. Taking in more than 1000 species worldwide and 5000 populations of fish, and turtles,marine mammals and a host of others, it draws the bleak conclusion that there is only half the amount of wildlife in the sea nowadays as in 1970.
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Source: theguardian.com