Our global review of animal loss in the oceans is just out today in Science (or for free here) in a paper authored with Doug McCauley, Steve Palumbi, Jim Estes, Francis Joye, and Bob Warner. As we report, today’s oceans remain vastly more wild places than land. You can take a couple turns off of Hollywood Boulevard, don snorkel gear, and swim among three-hundred-pound giant sea bass and see families of grey whales – all of this within sight of the skyscrapers of Los Angeles. Yet, at the same time the majority of large tunas and sharks are gone, cod stocks have collapsed, and whales are just now climbing back from near extinction. We find that the same patterns that led to the collapse of wildlife populations on land are now occurring in the sea, but ocean exploitation remains centuries or even millennia behind in the oceans. The next one hundred years promises to present major challenges to the health of marine wildlife.
Our press release
A slideshow on extinct species
Video to accompany the paper
New York Times (front page)
And Carl Zimmer’s reflections on writing the piece (National Geographic blog)
Minnesota Public Radio: The Daily Circuit (interview at 1:59, podcast here)
NJTV and NJ Channel 13 evening news
ABC7 Los Angeles (broadcast 12/16)