Atlantic Ocean sharks get new

By: Juliet Eilperin
The Washington Post, November 28, 2010

International delegates Saturday adopted new protections for seven species of shark in the Atlantic Ocean but rejected restrictions for bluefin tuna and swordfish, leaving the future of some of the world's most imperiled marine predators uncertain.

On the last day of voting at the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas, the group agreed to ban the fishing and sale of oceanic whitetip sharks and six types of hammerheads: great, scalloped, scoophead, smalleye, smooth and whitefin. The fins from both of these shark species are used to make the Asian delicacy shark's-fin soup.

Populations of oceanic whitetip shark have declined 99 percent in the Gulf of Mexico and the Mediterranean, while hammerheads' numbers have dropped 99 percent in the Mediterranean.

While putting a ban on fishing for some sharks, the representatives declined to significantly cut back on the catch of eastern Atlantic bluefin tuna off Europe or shut down the tuna's spawning grounds in the Gulf of Mexico and Mediterranean. Scientists warn that the species is now in danger of becoming commercially extinct because it is so highly valued in Japan and other nations for its buttery flesh.

They reduced the tuna's 2011 fishing quota in the eastern Atlantic, close to Europe, by just 4 percent, to 12,900 metric tons, and in the western Atlantic, they cut it from 1,800 to 1,750 metric tons for next year.

Michael Hirshfield, chief scientist for the advocacy group Oceana, said that the nearly two-week-long meeting in Paris produced a few environmental victories, "but it's three years late and three dollars short."

"Considering the status of the species that they're supposed to be conserving, they're still nowhere," Hirshfield said in a phone interview from Paris.

Matt Rand, who directs global shark conservation for the Washington-based Pew Environment Group, said in a phone interview from Paris the decisions show that policymakers are responding to the criticism they received this spring after the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora failed to adopt a single measure restricting the global trade of species such as oceanic whitetip and various types of hammerhead.

Rand said the votes demonstrate "fisheries managers around the world are paying attention to shark issues," although he added that it still means only a tiny fraction of the sharks that swim in the Atlantic now are protected from fishing vessels.

"It's a good step forward but far short of what is needed to save the world's sharks," Rand said.

Read more:

The (previously) secret sex life of corals

An Israeli marine biologist is the first to discover the extraordinary gender-reversal approach to reproduction of the Japanese mushroom coral.

A female mushroom stony coral expels eggs through its mouth
to the water column in the coral reefs of Okinawa, Japan.

By Abagail Leichman
Israel 21c, November 23, 2010

Marine biologist Yossi Loya didn't set out to scrutinize the sex lives of Japanese mushroom coral. But when he began to examine how this unusual species was coping with global warming, he witnessed its extraordinary gender-reversal approach to reproduction.

"Sex change in corals is the most exciting research I've ever done," admits the Tel Aviv University professor, who is the only Israeli ever to win the

Darwin Medal of the International Society for Reef Studies and the first ecologist in 50 years to be elected to the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities.

Over the course of more than a decade, Loya and Okinawan researchers at the Sosoko Marine Science Lab discovered that unlike most coral, of which 85 percent are hermaphrodites, mushroom coral switch genders repeatedly during their reproductive years. Nobody had seen this phenomenon in previous coral studies, Loya tells ISRAEL21c.

Evolutionary ingenuity

As he has been documenting in scientific journals, one of these corals reverses its gender annually in middle age. The youngsters, all males, become female and retain their gender in their later years.

Based on his expertise with coral over the past 40 years, Loya assumes this phenomenon is an evolutionarily ingenious way for the coral to conserve energy while increasing their overall reproductive success.

"The recipe to succeed in evolution is to produce as many children as you can so they'll arrive to a reproductive state and continue to spread your genes," he explains. It seems likely that mushroom coral individuals of intermediate sizes lack the energy needed for female reproduction year after year. Changing their gender to male in alternate years allows them to conserve energy until they reach the critical size at which they can acquire enough energy to remain female.

While working toward his master's degree at Tel Aviv University, he met the late Prof. Lawrence Slobodkin, a foremost American ecologist visiting Israel as a guest lecturer. By invitation of Slobodkin, the newlywed Loya left Israel right after the Six-Day War to follow his mentor. While earning his doctorate at the State University of New York-Stony Brook on New York's Long Island, Loya innovated a method for measuring the health of a coral reef, which marine scientists still use to this day.

Mini reef, major publications

"There are no coral reefs at Stony Brook," he admits. However, through Slobodkin, he returned to Israel on a Smithsonian Institution grant to quantify the community structure and species diversity of reef corals in Eilat, something that had never been done before.

"Eilat has one of the smallest coral reefs in the world," he reveals. It measures just 1.9 miles kilometers, as compared to Australia's 1,553-mile Great Barrier Reef, where Loya heads a study center staffed by 150 graduate students.

However, he jokes, "the number of publications on coral reef studies in Israel is the highest in the world - per square meter." He is responsible for many of those, having written two books on coral reef ecology and more than 215 journal articles on ecology, evolution and life history strategies of stony corals.

A full professor at Tel Aviv University in marine ecology since 1985 and former dean of the Faculty of Life Sciences, Loya has been a visiting professor at institutions and universities in Australia, Massachusetts, California and Japan.

‘From underwater rainforest to underwater desert'

The scientist is increasingly concerned about the effect of global warming on coral reefs, often called the "rain forests of the sea" for their highly diverse ecosystem. "Once corals are affected, everything else dependent on the corals is affected as well," he states. "They form the basic structure of the reef, which provides hiding places for many varieties of fish, invertebrates and other organisms."

Following the particularly hot summer of 1998, one-fourth of the world's coral reefs turned white and corals literally starved to death due to the loss of algae supplying most of their nutrients. In Japan, Loya and his colleagues found that 85% of the coral reefs around Okinawa were dead, and about 10 species had become extinct. "It had gone from an underwater rainforest to an underwater desert," he says.

It was during this investigation that Loya happened upon the astonishing sex-changing behavior of a particular type of coral never studied before.

"Corals have many reproductive strategies, which explains their 250 million-year-old evolutionary success," he says. Coral reproduction everywhere corresponds to moon cycles. The Japanese mushroom coral release their eggs and sperm into the water for exactly five nights after the full moon every July and August, starting at 10pm and finishing at 4am "You can set your watch to it. Their biological clock is unbelievable," he concludes.

New business in bycatch 'will lead to catastrophe'

Photo Credit: NOAA

By: Heok Hee Ng
November 11, 2010, Practical Fishkeeping

Going to the nearest market to pick up a few lizardfishes and flatheads (fishes traditionally not considered to be good eating) for the dinner table is rapidly becoming a reality in some parts of the world. This is the result of the commercialisation of bycatch (less desirable species that are incidentally caught and traditionally discarded).

This trend has potentially disastrous consequences for the world’s ocean ecosystems, highlighted a study published in a recent issue of the journal Conservation Letters.

Aaron Lobo and co-authors revealed this sad state of affairs along the Coromandel Coast (the southeastern coast of India) after conducting extensive surveys of the bottom trawl fishery of the region and interviewing both trawler owners and trash fish (bycatch) dealers.

From the information they obtained, the authors reconstructed trends in income, bycatch figures, and the catch of marketable species over the past 30 years.

The authors found a sharp decline in the catches and income from the target species (such as penaeid shrimps, lobsters, groupers, snappers and barracudas) over the last two decades.

At the same time, the cost of operating the trawlers has increased substantially to the point that it almost exceeds the income obtained from target species. This has forced the fishermen to begin selling bycatch (which was traditionally discarded), both for human consumption (e.g. lizardfishes, flatheads and rays) as well as for the production of animal feed (e.g. cardinalfishes, sea urchins and mantis shrimp) to support the region’s rapidly growing poultry industry.

While reducing waste and improving livelihoods, the increasing reliance on bycatch to sustain the trawl fisheries in the Coromandel Coast has the potential to exploit marketable species to the point beyond economic extinction and from which they may never recover.

Without sustainable management, the bycatch-supported prolongation of trawl fishing along the Coromandel Coast will lead to an ecological catastrophe for the nearshore marine ecosystems, warn the authors.

For more information, see the paper: Lobo, AS, A Balmford, R Arthur and A Manica (2010) Commercializing bycatch can push a fishery beyond economic extinction. Conservation Letters 3, pp. 277–285.

Educational Opportunity in Bellingham, WA

Kinship Foundation is issuing a call for applications for its 2011 Kinship Conservation Fellows program located in Bellingham, Washington.  Kinship’s intensive, in-residence instruction in the forces that drive environmental markets will transform the way that you work. 

The 2011 program will take place from June 28-July 29 in Bellingham, Washington.  Kinship will be accepting applications for the 2011 cohort through January 24, 2011.  Please visit the Kinship website at www.kinshipfellows.org  for more information or to apply for consideration as a 2011 Kinship Fellow.  Applications should be submitted online.  Eighteen Fellows will be selected to participate and awarded $6,000 and lodging for their month in Bellingham. 

If you have questions, please contact:

Sarah Knobloch

Kinship Foundation

303 West Madison, Suite 1800

Chicago, IL 60606

Phone:  312.803.6200

Fax:  312.803.6201

Email:  sarah.knobloch@kinshiptrustco.com

Extreme Corals 2010 Expedition sets sail

Today, the NOAA ship Ron Brown departs Pensacola, FL, on the Extreme Corals 2010 Expedition.  Chief scientists, Steve Ross, UNCW, and Sandra Brooke, Marine Conservation and Biology Institute, lead the effort to explore and characterize deep coral ecosystems from the West Florida Shelf to the northern Florida east coast using WHOI's Jason ROV. We have set up a Web portal for the expedition at http://cioert.org/xcorals.  The NC Museum of Natural Science is partnering on this web offering, providing access to daily blogs from sea, image gallery, education materials and more at http://deepcoral.wordpress.com.

Bluefin Tuna Black Market: How A Runaway Fishing Industry Looted The Seas

Tuna hauled aboard a purse seine vessel in 2007
Photo Credit: Felix Sanchez, Madrid

By: Mariana Walker Guevara, Kate Willson, and Marcos Garcia Rey, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists The Huffington Post, November 8, 2010

The rapid demise of Eastern Atlantic bluefin tuna, the source of prized sushi around the world, is due to a $4 billion black market and a decade of rampant fraud and lack of official oversight, according to Looting the Seas, a new investigation by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.

As regulators gather in Paris this month to decide the fate of the threatened bluefin, ICIJ's investigation reveals that behind plummeting stocks of the fish is a supply chain riddled with criminal misconduct and negligence, from fishing fleets to sea ranches to distributors.

Each year, thousands of tons of fish have been illegally caught and traded, the seven-month investigation found. At its peak - between 1998 and 2007- this black market included more than one out of every three bluefin caught, conservatively valued at $400 million per year.

"Everyone cheated," said Roger Del Ponte, a French fishing captain. "There were rules, but we didn't follow them."

The Eastern Atlantic bluefin, whose spawning stock has plummeted nearly 75 percent since 1974, is prized by sushi lovers for its soft, red flesh. One large fish can fetch more than $100,000 in Japan, which consumes around 80 percent of the global bluefin market. The widely hunted bluefin has also become a bellwether, the latest threatened species in a feeding frenzy that has seen the disappearance of as much as 90 percent of the ocean's large fish.

ed by the French, Spanish, and Italians, joined by Turks and others, Mediterranean fishermen violated official quotas at will and engaged in an array of illegal practices: misreporting catch size, hiring banned spotter planes, catching undersized fish, and plundering tuna from North African waters where EU inspectors are refused entry. An illicit market even arose in trading quotas - when regulators finally started enforcing the rules - in which one vessel sells its nation's quota to a foreign vessel that had overfished.

The bluefin black market is not a surprise to some experts. "Fisheries are one of the most criminalized sectors in the world," said Daniel Pauly, a marine biologist at the University of British Columbia, who was one of the earliest voices to warn the world about the impact of commercial fishing on marine ecosystems. "This generates so much money that it's like drugs."

This black market has been abetted by a host of officials, from overworked local inspectors to international regulators - most notably the International Commission for the Conservation of the Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT), a regulatory body set up to protect the bluefin stocks, which frequently ignored its own scientists' recommendations for smaller fishing quotas and tighter controls.

"There was just no political will to enforce the rules, most notably the quota," said Jean- Marc Fromentin, a marine biologist and a member of ICCAT's scientific body. "Until 2008... there was no enforcement. No one declared. There was general cheating."

On November 17, ICCAT member countries will gather in Paris to decide on a host of recommendations in the hope of preserving the fish from collapse, including a possible moratorium on industrial bluefin fishing.

Biologists warn that at stake is more than the mere loss of a favorite source of sushi. Bluefin tuna, they say, are near the top of the food chain and their demise will have dire consequences for marine ecosystems. Without large predators, entire food chains may erode, leaving the seas overrun by millions of jelly fish and micro-organisms.

Looting the Seas, an ICIJ investigation, is being released as an online series. A companion documentary, produced by ICIJ and London-based tve, appears on BBC World News on November 6-7, 2010. BBC World News broadcast times vary around the world. For details of broadcasts in your region, check the BBC World News website.

Oil Spill Investigation A 'High Priority' For Justice

Photo Credit: US Coast Guard/Getty Images

By: Carrie Johnson
National Public Radio, November 8, 2010

As part of the U.S. Justice Department's investigation into the Deepwater Horizon explosion in the Gulf of Mexico, a federal judge in New Orleans recently created a security zone around the collapsed rig, the legal equivalent of taking yellow police tape and draping it around the watery crime scene.

Although the investigation is happening below the surface, there's a lot going on at the Justice Department.

"This investigation is a very high priority for the Department of Justice, and so senior officials up to the top ... are very involved," said Gary Grindler, acting deputy attorney general.

Over the past several months, Grindler, Attorney General Eric Holder and other senior Justice Department officials visited the Gulf to look at critical pieces of evidence, such as the four-story-high blowout preventer.

"A tremendous number of resources are being devoted to this," Grindler said. "There are at least 40 attorneys that are involved in both the civil division and the criminal side of the house.

"We have U.S. attorneys' offices along the Gulf that have been affected that are actively involved."

This investigation could be a long haul. The Justice Department has leased office space across the street from the courthouse in New Orleans, inside which prosecutors are going through documents and building a case. Grindler spoke in general terms and was careful not to offer details about the criminal probe

If the Justice Department decides that there are individuals who should be charged, it's very likely that they would contest the charges, because they could go to jail.

- University of Michigan Law Professor David Uhlmann

But David Uhlmann, a former environmental crimes prosecutor who now teaches at the University of Michigan Law School, is closely following the oil spill investigation.

"Proving that there was negligence on the criminal side, proving that there was an oil spill on the civil side, these are relatively easy matters for them to prove, based on what we already know," Uhlmann said.

Uhlmann says criminal charges against BP and Transocean, which operated the rig, could be a foregone conclusion. The only real issue, he says, is how much the companies will pay to settle allegations they released oil into the Gulf.

Uhlmann says he thinks charges are likely against Halliburton, too, after a presidential commission found the company may have used faulty cement to seal the well.

Investigators are also looking at the big picture, the corporate culture at BP and other safety lapses to determine how they may have foreshadowed the rig disaster.

"The really big question mark is what will happen with individuals," Uhlmann said. "If the Justice Department decides that there are individuals who should be charged, it's very likely that they would contest the charges, because they could go to jail."

Prosecuting Individuals

Jane Barrett, a former prosecutor who now teaches at the University of Maryland, has studied environmental cases over the past decade.

"In the last 10 years, what we've seen is a tendency just to go with the corporate plea," Barrett said. "And in particular. the individuals that get charged are those who are affiliated with, not with your Fortune 200 companies, but smaller companies."

Barrett says individual employees involved in the oil spill deserve a close look from prosecutors. But it can be difficult to prove any one employee knows enough about safety problems to become the target of criminal charges. The Justice Department, for instance, never charged the captain of the Exxon Valdez with wrongdoing after that disaster in which crude oil was spilled in Prince William Sound, Alaska.

The new Justice Department investigation could be complicated by another factor: Some of the managers on the oil rig already are invoking their rights to remain silent.

But Grindler, the Justice Department's second in command, said that authorities haven't ruled anything out and that they are considering every legal tool at their disposal, including looking at violations of the Clean Water Act, the Oil Pollution Act, the Migratory Bird Act and the Endangered Species Act.

And there's another law, too, experts say: the Seaman's Manslaughter Statute from the 1800s. Unlike most environmental laws, the seaman's statute allows the government to bring felony charges if it can prove workers onboard a vessel, like the oil rig, die because of neglect from the ship captain or ship owner.

In all, 11 men died after the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon. Prosecutors are keeping the life rafts as evidence.

As for the crime scene security zone in the Gulf of Mexico, the judge said no one is supposed to touch it until October 2011, giving the Justice Department at least another year to plug away at its huge investigation.

MCBI and the Gulf Oil Spill Disaster

\I

It's been over 6 months now since the Deepwater Horizon oil spill first started, and we are getting the first real reports back on what the consequences are on the sea floor. When oil first started spilling, everyone was worried what would happen when it inevitably hit shore. Here at MCBI, we were immediately worried about what was happening on the sea floor, particularly what would happen to the deep sea coral communities. We have been working on deep sea coral protection for years, and we were really worried about what would happen to these delicate creatures. Not many people seem to know what deep sea corals are, so in case you haven't heard of them they're corals that do not rely on sunlight to grow, they grab their nutrients out of the water around them. They are very delicate, slow growing creatures that can live for hundreds, sometimes even thousands of years. They provide essential habitat for many species, including a number of commercially important fish species. They're usually found in deep and cold water in places all over the world, many of which are not traditionally known as coral reef hot spots of biological diversity. There are excellent deep sea coral communities in Florida and Hawaii, but some of the largest and best in the United States are in Alaska, and still more exist in the Pacific Northwest, New England, and the Gulf of Mexico.

Sandra Brooke, MCBI's coral conservation director has spent much of the last 3 months on several deep sea coral cruises in the Gulf of Mexico and the South Atlantic. In fact, she's on one right now, and we should have a report on what she finds when she gets back later this month. As you'll see on the post below, she's not the only one out there, and coral scientists from all over the country are heading to the Gulf to see what the damage will be. Initial reports back, miles away from the spill were promising, with little evident damage to deep sea coral communities at first glance, but reports that are just coming back from areas closer to the well are devastating, as you can tell from many of the posts below.

The oil has stopped spilling, it's not pilling up in globs on shore anymore, but the damage done to the environment is far from over. Here's hoping it won't be nearly as bad as we fear.

Dead Coral Found Near Site of Gulf Oil Spill

JOHN COLLINS RUDOLF for the New York Times

A survey of the sea floor near BP’s blown-out well in the Gulf of Mexico has turned up dead and dying coral reefs that were probably damaged by the oil spill, scientists said on Friday.   
The coral sites lie seven miles southwest of the well, at a depth of about 4,500 feet, in an area where large plumes of dispersed oil were discovered drifting through the deep ocean last spring in the early weeks after the spill.
The large swaths of darkened coral and other damaged marine organisms were almost certainly dying from exposure to toxins, scientists said. 
The corals were discovered on Tuesday by scientists aboard a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration research vessel, using a submersible robot equipped with still and video cameras and sampling tools. 


Read more...

Judge asks U.S. to review polar bear listing

A polar bear walks along the shore of Hudson Bay, Manitoba
Photo Credit: Rueters/Chris Wattie

By: Timothy Gardner
Reuters, November 4, 2010

A U.S. judge on Thursday asked the Obama administration to clarify whether polar bears are endangered, a listing that ultimately could be used to force polluters to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases.

U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan asked the Interior Department for more information on whether the bears, which are losing Arctic sea ice habitat due to global warming, could be considered endangered instead of merely threatened.

The move came after environmental groups challenged a 2008 decision by the administration of President George W. Bush to list the bears as threatened, a ruling the Obama administration upheld last year.

If Interior eventually decided to list them as endangered, the bears would get full protection under federal law.

U.S. oil refiners, coal-burning power plants and other polluters of greenhouse gases far away from Alaska could get sued for contributing to global warming and be forced to cut emissions to protect the bears.

Bush's Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne had ruled that polar bears were threatened, not endangered, because they faced no immediate threat of extinction.

Sullivan rejected that notion and asked Interior to "provide a reasonable interpretation of the definition of an 'endangered species,' as applied to its listing determination fro the polar bear."

Kassie Siegel, a lawyer for the Center for Biological Diversity, which challenged the listing with other groups, said Sullivan's move might lead to an endangered listing.

"It opens the door for the Obama administration to break with the flawed decision and policies of the Bush administration," she said.

Opponents of full protection for the bears have said that projections about the threat to the species have not been based on current population levels, but on expectations of melting sea ice.

The Interior Department would not comment on the case as it is still in litigation. It has until December 23 to reply to the judge.

BP SPILL WAS A GREATER DISASTER THAN PUBLIC KNEW

A new study shows how BP and the Federal government dramatically understated the amount of oil and gas gushing into the Gulf of Mexico after the Deepwater Horizon exploded. The study, “Impacts, Perception, and Policy Implications of the Deepwater Horizon Oil and Gas Disaster” by MCBI’s Dr. Elliott Norse and SkyTruth’s John Amos, appears in a special issue of Environmental Law Reporter News and Analysis It can be downloaded here.

Get Out & Vote!

If you haven't done so already, get yourself to your polling place or your nearest mailbox (if you're lucky enough to live in a place like Washington where you can vote by mail) and determine the future of your state and our country.

Find your polling place and voting information

 

Seafood everyone can enjoy

I just got back from my first meeting of the Conservation Alliance for Seafood Solutions. This year's meeting was in Portland, Maine. It was the best meeting I've ever been to. It was small, targeted, and filled with people who really wanted to make a difference in the sustainable seafood movement. And did I mention that it was filled with tasty sustainable seafood? Oh, that was the best part. I even had a James-Beard award-winning chef teach me how to properly shuck and oyster. I now feel extra motivated to work on our sustainable seafood program.

Here at MCBI, we really started our sustainable seafood program this year, with our partnership with Holland America Line.We have always worked on sustainable fishing methods, in some ways, that's was the foundation for MCBI's existence in the first place. This is the first time we've taken that a step farther and are working with consumers to affect change in the marketplace. I'm very proud of the work we've done so far, and I think it's only going to get better from here on out.

Over the last year, there has been a surge of sustainable seafood options on the marketplace for everyone and lots of major retailers have gotten on board (with the help of many of the Alliance member organizations). Whole Foods, Target, Wal-Mart, and most of the major supermarket chains in the US and Canada are adopting some sort of sustainable seafood program and labeling system. This should make it easier for anyone to buy sustainable seafood, wherever you live in the United States. AND, it should be easier and clearer than ever. The NGO community is working together to make buying sustainable seafood simple and easy, and if you haven't made a commitment to purchase only sustainable seafood, it's about time to start.

Britain sets up the world's largest marine reserve

But biologists warn that international inaction is leaving oceans dangerously exposed to overfishing

The Chagos archipelago in the Indian Ocean

becomes "a no-take" zone from midnight Oct. 31,
and is home to the endangered hawksbill turtle.
Photo Credit: AFP/Getty Images

By: Jonathan Owen
The Independent, October 31, 2010

At midnight tonight, the world's largest fully protected marine reserve will come into force in the British territorial waters of the Chagos Archipelago, in the Indian Ocean.

But this new sanctuary, designated as a "no-take" zone where commercial fishing will be banned, serves to underline how catastrophically the international community has fallen short of a goal set almost a decade ago to protect marine life.

In 2002, the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and the World Summit on Sustainable Development made a commitment to protect 10 per cent of the world's oceans by 2012. Today, with only 15 months to go, it is estimated that just 1.17 per cent of the world's oceans are under some form of protection, and a mere 0.08 per cent classified as "no-take" zones.

Yesterday, government representatives at a UN conference on biodiversity held in Nagoya, Japan, put the 2012 deadline back to 2020. Marine experts warned that it is scandalous that the original deadline will not be met, and said the 10 per cent target falls far short of what is needed. A third of ocean waters need protection to give species a fighting chance of survival, they said.

The shortfall between target and achievement was described as "massive" by Dr Heather Koldewey, manager of the Zoological Society of London's international marine and freshwater conservation programme. The failure to get anywhere near the original goal would result in "a massive loss of marine resources and, with that, an associated loss of people's livelihoods", she warned. "In terms of maintaining marine environments in some kind of operational form, science believes that actual protection should be in the region of 30 to 40 per cent," she added.

More no-take marine reserves are vital to maintain sufficient life in our oceans, according to the marine biologist Professor Charles Sheppard, from the University of Warwick. "Governments need to stand up to the fishing industry lobby before it is too late. We cannot afford to have any more delay by governments in honouring their commitments to protect areas of ocean." Failure to do this would result in "degradation of the habitat, followed swiftly by degradation of the people who would have been supported by the habitat", he added.

Read more: