Articles by Andrew Sharpless

Even more numbers to illuminate the vast ocean

Perhaps because it was released the same week as Ben Halpern and colleagues' excellent human impacts map, the new U.N. report "In Dead Water" has been met with little fanfare. It's too bad, because the report is a natural complement to the scientists' graphic illustration of the intersection between humans and the seas.

"In Dead Water" takes a big-picture look at the five primary threats facing the oceans: pollution, climate change, overfishing, invasive species, and habitat loss. You can download the report here (PDF); I plucked out some of its major findings in an oceanic ode to the Harper's Index. With apologies to Lewis Lapham:

Tracking whaling ships and whale sharks

Anti-whaling activists planted tracking devices on Japanese whaling ships as part of a campaign to disrupt the annual hunt, and the Australian customs ship that had been monitoring the hunt returned to port with photographs and video to use for future legal action ...

... a study showed that commercial fishing forced fish to evolve into meeker, less active creatures that carry fewer eggs. Bolder and more adventuresome fish were more likely to be caught by gillnets ...

... the butterflyfish, a common resident of coral reefs, was in danger of extinction because it could only eat one species of coral, Acropora hyacinthus, which is highly vulnerable ...

Shark superhighways and radioactive fish bones

Scientists studying the sea floor near Antarctica discovered new species of fish, plankton and jellyfish. "We had some of the world's experts on Antarctic fish and they were completely, completely flabbergasted," said the leader of the expedition ...

... a researcher studying a dead zone off the northwest coast of the U.S. saw nothing on the ocean floor. "It appeared that everything that couldn't swim or scuttle away had died," she said. The dead zone is thought to be a result of climate change ...

... the government of Taiwan allocated $1 million in Taiwanese new dollars to clear the shore of dead fish, both wild and farmed, that had died during a recent cold snap ...

Hungry humpheads and sustainable fish in U.K. groceries

28 cases of ciguatera fish poisoning have been documented since November. Fish such as grouper, snapper, and amberjack eat toxic algae, and people who eat the contaminated fish can suffer from nausea and vomiting. In serious cases, neurological problems can last for months or years ...

... a federal judge rejected President Bush's exemption of the U.S. Navy to rules regulating sonar ...

... scientists at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography suggested that wind may be behind the sardine and anchovy booms and busts off the California coast over the last century ...