Saturday, October 3, 2009

Will the time come, when there will be no fish left in the sea?

In class last week we watched a movie called, “Affluenza”. This was a movie about how many aquamarine species are becoming extinct because of the inadequate techniques of our late fishermen. Our now-a-day hunters of the sea inherited these horrific practices, leading to our current problem: a decline of sea life.
There are many destructive fishing techniques used by our fishermen, a few are fishing with explosives, using poisons such as cyanide or pesticides, bottom trawls, and muroami. Fishing with explosives, also known as blast fishing, has probably been in existence for centuries and is apparently spreading. Explosions can produce fairly large craters, devastating ten to twenty square meters of bottom. In coral reefs, decolonization of damaged habitats is very slow and complete recovery may take several decades. The explosion kills both the target fish and the accompanying fauna. People have been injured and even killed from this. Explosives and the raw materials for preparing explosives, such as fertilizers and sugar, are inexpensive and easily available. Which makes this type of fishing hard to shy away from. Using poisons to catch certain fish kill off many parts of the sea ecosystem including fish, coral, plants, etc. The muroami technique is used mostly in Southeast Asia which uses an encircling net together with pounding devices. These devices usually comprise large stones fitted on ropes that are pounded onto the coral reefs. This scares the fish out of the coral and smashes the coral to pieces. Then the net encloses the fish and the fishermen take them for market.
I think these practices are a disgrace and if the population knew about them, they would do something to stop it. We can’t let this go on much longer. If it does then what will become of earth’s aquamarine life?

No comments:

Post a Comment