Sea creatures sick, dying or disappearing at alarming rate all along Pacific coast… Some wonder if it’s fallout from Fukushima'' — New York Times: 'Ocean Life Faces Mass Extinction' — Study: 'We may be on precipice of major extinction event' in marine wildlife (VIDEO)
University of California Santa Barbara, Jan 15, 2015: A consortium of scientists, including UC Santa Barbara’s Douglas McCauley, has found that the same patterns that led to the collapse of wildlife populations on land are now occurring in the sea… Their findings are published today in the journal Science… “All signs indicate that we may be initiating a marine industrial revolution,” [McCauley] said. “We are setting ourselves up in the oceans to replay the process of wildlife Armageddon that we engineered on land.”
New York Times, Jan 15, 2015: A team of scientists… has concluded that humans are on the verge of causing unprecedented damage to the oceans and the animals living in them. “We may be sitting on a precipice of a major extinction event,” said Douglas J. McCauley, an ecologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and an author of the new research, which was published on Thursday in the journal Science.
Science — ‘Marine defaunation: Animal loss in the global ocean’, Jan 16, 2014: Loss of species in marine environments… appears to be increasing rapidly. McCauley et al. review the recent patterns of species decline and loss in marine environments… they note many worrying declines… our effects on marine animals are increasing in pace and impact… today’s low rates of marine extinction may be the prelude to a major extinction pulse… habitat destruction is likely to become an increasingly dominant threat to ocean wildlife [and] is likely to intensify as a major driver of marine wildlife loss. Proactive intervention can avert a marine defaunation disaster of the magnitude observed on land.
University of California Santa Barbara: UCSB scientists lead a team designing a Marine Biodiversity Observation Network to track many species of marine organisms over time… Project partners include… the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station Mitigation Monitoring Program… UCSB investigators involved in the project [include] Daniel Reed…
University of California Santa Barbara: The San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS) Mitigation Monitoring Program is based at the Marine Science Institute, University of California Santa Barbara [150 miles away]. Long-term monitoring and evaluation of the SONGS mitigation projects is a condition of the coastal development permit… Principal Investigators [include] Dan Reed, Research Biologist, Marine Science Institute, University of California Santa Barbara.
Watch UCSB’s video on the study here
Published: January 18th, 2015 at 3:21 pm ETBy ENENews |