From [HERE] and [MORE on racism/white supremacy and white folks hell bent on destroying damn near everything]. The loss of animal species in the planet's oceans is expected to "rapidly intensify" due to human-caused activities, but swift intervention could still prevent "disaster of the magnitude observed on land," according to a study published Friday in the journal Science.
Humans have "profoundly decreased" the number marine animals, large and small, though there have been few outright extinctions, the study notes. That’s because animal loss attributed to human activity "began in earnest tens of thousands of years later in the oceans that it did on land."
But there is growing concern that low extinction rates seen today “may be the prelude to a major extinction pulse, similar to that observed on land during the industrial revolution” — and that has wider implications for humans and marine life, such as "imperiling food sustainability" for humans and depleting "a wide range of ecologically important marine fauna."
“We may be sitting on a precipice of a major extinction event,” ecologist Douglas J. McCauley, of the University of California, Santa Barbara and a co-author of the study, told the New York Times, referring to marine life.
Unsustainable fishing is the principal threat to marine life today, according to the study, but the ocean life faces a number of dangers.
The study’s authors say the great whale species, while no longer being hunted on a wide scale, face hazards that include noise pollution and oil exploration. Bottom trawling, an industrial fishing method that can alter marine habitats, can also put species at risk