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We just finished watching the documentary movie called the Cove. Winner of the Audience Award for Best Documentary at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival. One of the major people behind this film is the person who captured and trained the 5 dolphins that were filmed for the movie Flipper.
Most people in the world love Dolphins and whales. These powerful and gentle creatures are amongst the smartest animals in the world and Dolphins have larger brains than humans for their body weight.
Japan is hunting whales and slaughtering 23,000 Dolphins for meat every year. Because dolphins are at the top of the food chain, mercury is concentrated. Allowable rates of mercury are .4 ppm but samples of dolphin meat registered 2000ppm! This meat is unpopular so they sell it as whale meat. The government trying to get rid of a surplus decided to feed it to the school kids. At least as a result of this film, they stopped poisoning the school kids.
If most Japanese oppose it, and don't like the meat, why kill them? Some fishermen see the disappearing fishery stocks due to over fishing and blame the sea lions and dolphins because they eat fish.
The problem is not with the dolphins the problem is us humans. McDonald's sells so many fish sandwiches that the fish they catch can become endangered. They used to use Pollack, but they became scarce, then they used Orange Roughy but they became scarce, then they found an ugly fish called Hoki, and now that is becoming scarce. See: http://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/wilderness-resources/stories/your-filet-o-fish-is-endangered
A global 10 year study published in the international journal Nature, concludes that 90 percent of all large fishes have disappeared from the world's oceans in the past half century, the devastating result of industrial fishing. Things look grim for large species like sharks, swordfish, tuna and marlin. See: http://www.icue.com/portal/site/iCue/flatview/?cuecard=39768
One of the most damaging methods of fishing is called bottom trawling. Huge nets that are weighted at the bottom are dragged along the sea bed, destroying corals and other life. This is like strip mining the ocean and a large proportion of the catch (the bycatch)is killed and just dumped overboard again because they are not the preferred species. 27 million tons of fish - 27% of that taken is thrown back dead! http://archive.greenpeace.org/comms/fish/amaze.html
Another problem is that fishermen like to take the large fish, but some fish live as long as humans, except they law increasingly greater amounts of healthier eggs the older they get, so by only leaving the young immature fish we easily damage the species. One of the good things Bush did when he was in office is double the size of our ocean reserves, so these large fish can have room to reproduce.
Another danger to the sea is the increasing number and increasing size of dead zones occurring in the sea during the last 50 years. This is the result of excess nitrogen and phosphorous in rivers from sewage and farm run off. It creates algal blooms and when the algae die it depletes the oxygen so everything dies. Some dead zones are hundreds of miles wide. See: http://serc.carleton.edu/microbelife/topics/deadzone/general.html
It is easy to look at the vastness of the oceans and imagine that we puny humans are insignificant compared to the vastness that covers 70% of the planet, but we are damaging this planet. Over 70% of the fisheries are depleted, and that is because of us. We are killing the oceans with pollutants and turning them acidic from too much CO2, and now we are changing the temperature of the planet so temperature sensitive coral will die. Coral reefs contain 25% of the life in the oceans even though they only cover 1% of the area. See: http://www.takepart.com/issues/overfishing/1114
I am raving instead of ranting because I think it is wonderful that films like The Cove are finally starting to educate people about the state of our planet. It is not too late to save it if we know what is happening out there in our beautiful oceans.