AP, etc: From AAAS, word on a rich new marine census, and boosts for marine preserves
A bit down I have a roundup of news from AAAS. One bunch either merits a post of its own or I randomly chose to do so. It’s on new results on the oceans’ biodiversity richness and a report – in PNAS and spotlighted at AAAS - on the role of protected reservations in keeping it rich.
The AP‘s Randolph E. Schmid gives the census treatment long by daily wire standards. Its gist is that while species abundance may be in trouble, so far the sheer number of known varieties keeps going up. The report at the San Diego meeting is an advance peek at a study now in its 11th year and due for release in October in London. The piece provides a good sense of the wealth out there just waiting to be put in the ledger – with 5,600 news species added last fall and perhaps another 100,000 more yet unfound. That does not even count microbes, but who could possibly count all the sea’s microbe varieties? That’s a job for statisticians and others who extrapolate from the known to the sure.
The same basic news gets a very different take in the UK’s Independent, where Steve Connor runs it under a succinct hed: Great whites more threatened than tigers. But can it be true that the sharks’ number is now smaller than that of wild tigers? Shark deficits similarly grab the lede for the Guardian‘s Ian Sample . Sample, after noting that the poor image of sharks erodes public worry about them, helpfully runs the picture by Getty’s Brandon Cole above to show exactly why some people think their disappearance might be fine. Not helpful. I too couldn’t resist.
The taking of sharks whether white, blue, gray, leopard spotted, tiger striped, hammer headed or whale-sized is surely among the more dismal excesses of the fishing industry – especially those knife-wielding boat crews provisioning fins to the makers of soup. But one thinks this claim of fewer great whites than tigers merits sharp scrutiny and ought to be borne by more than a few sources as the authority for it.
Grist for the Mill: AAAS Press Release 1, Press Release 2 ;
- Charlie Petit
