“Mankind is unable to live on this earth with the dead sea. We are at war with the Oceans and if we win this war, we are going to lose it all”

Cyrill Gutsch, Founder and CEO of Parley for the Oceans

With more than 72% of the earth’s surface, the ocean not only makes our globe stunning with its deep blue color and mesmerizing species, it supports life on the land by maintaining environmental balance. It is home to 99% of all habitable space on our planet, absorbs 50% of the CO2, and generates 85% of the Oxygen we breathe. Along with that, it is the largest Carbon sink and holds the biggest ecosystem on the planet. It also plays an important role in regulating the climate on a global scale by absorbing excessive heat. 

This natural phenomenon has been disturbed greatly by excessive human intervention. The use of highly unsustainable methods has not only endangered marine life and its complex ecosystem but it poses an existential threat to other species living on the land along with human beings.

Our unprecedented impact on the ocean

Plastic pollution is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the damage caused by practices such as marine parks, whaling, commercial fishing, and bycatch. The fishing industry is a multi-billion-dollar industry that includes, among others, the Tuna-industry and Shark-finning industry which has proven to be lethal for marine life and responsible for the drastic and unprecedented decline of the marine population.

Plastic Pollution: A tip of the iceberg 

The world’s oceans are highly polluted with ever-increasing plastic debris entering the waters every day. Currently, around 190 million tons of garbage are sitting in the ocean threatening the whole ecosystem and the lives of marine species. Over time, this plastic debris breaks down into microplastic parties that are estimated to be 500 times more in number than the stars in the universe. Fish and birds mistake them for food and feed them in enormous quantities. They have been seeping into every creature living in the ocean and turning it into a toxic plastic soup which threatens every life that breathes over there and once who feeds on them outside the ocean.

Commercial Whaling

Whales are facing the danger of extinction as their overhunt in the 1960s has drastically impacted their population. Despite the international ban on whaling countries like Japan, Iceland and Norway have still failed to follow the measures and continue the cruel way of killing whales. 300,000 whales, dolphins and porpoises are killed as bycatch and these countries specifically target whales for their meat and body. The international ban on commercial whaling was imposed in 1986 but Japan, Iceland and Norway have killed around 40,000 large whales since then. Large whales play an important part in maintaining marine life as they are at the top of the food chain. Their significant role in capturing Carbon from the environment is crucial to assuage the impact of Climate Change. Each whale sequesters 33 tons of Carbon in a year compared to a tree which only absorbs 48 pounds of CO2 per year.

Shark-fining Industry

Sharks are caught for their meat and fins. Shark fining is a multi-billion-dollar industry again, whose agenda is profit-making not saving lives. Its profits are second after the illegal drug industry, with over one million sharks killed annually.  Sharks sit at the top of the food chain and once they disappear the entire ecosystem collapses. They keep the ecosystem alive and coral reefs too but with a rapid decrease in their number the threat to other life in the ocean becomes imminent. Today, the shark species population has decreased by alarming numbers such as Thresher (-80%), Bull (-86%), Smooth hammerhead (-86%), and scalloped hammerhead (-99%). The huge amount of shark hunting can be estimated from the fact that Sharks kill ten people per year whereas, we kill 11,000-30,000 sharks every hour.

Bycatch

Bycatch is the process used in commercial fishing where a mix of species is caught while hunting a specific kind of fish. Studies show that over 40% of all marine life caught is thrown back overboard as bycatch and most of them die during the process. On the Atlantic French coast alone, more than 10,000 dolphins are killed every year by bycatch. Whereas more than 300,000 Whales, dolphins and porpoises are killed by bycatch. 

Commercial fishing: Taking a toll on global marine population

The impact of commercial fishing is far worse than oil spills or plastic pollution. Considering its huge impact, let’s compare it with the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico which gushed oil into deep water threatening marine life for three months. The event was appalling and criticized in every form. Compared to that commercial fishing does a lot more damage to the marine ecosystem and kills more fish in a day than it was killed in the Gulf of Mexico for three months. Huge fishing vessels roam around in the oceans as death machines for marine life, but they don’t receive a word of condemnation from infamous voices because of their influence over them. As the main focus of commercial fishing is maximizing profit, the harmful activities are adopted to catch as much fish as possible regardless of the harm to unwanted species. These activities involve Longline fishing, Drift netting, Gillnets, Trawling, and Purse-seine nets among others that have taken a toll on the global marine population. The fish population has declined to near extinction (Halibut -99%), Cod (-86%), (Bluefin Tuna -97%), (Haddock -99%). With this trend continuing, we’ll see an empty ocean by 2048.

Fishing nets

The 2018 study by Scientific Reports tells that 46% of the Great Pacific garbage patch is made up of discarded fishing nets that pose a direct threat to marine life generally and turtles especially (Lebreton et al., 2018). According to Brooker (2022), around 1000 marine turtles die every year after entangling in plastic rubbish while in the US alone 250,000 turtles are captured, injured or killed by fishing vessels every year. These abandoned fishing nets never disappear and turn into small pieces which are mistaken by these species as food. It not only harms their internal organs but causes death in many cases due to them being exposed to toxic chemicals. Ingrid Giskes writes in her article in the Guardian that “A single abandoned net is estimated to kill 500,000 marine invertebrates, 1700 fish and four seabirds” and these ghost nets are the single most harmful form of marine debris.

Dying Coral Reefs

Elena Becatoros wrote in the Independent that more than 90% of the world’s coral reefs will die by 2050. Our unnatural footprints on the environment have projected irreversible damage to these species. Coral reefs are a crucial part of the marine ecosystem. They produce a fraction of the oxygen we breathe, provide habitat to one in four marine species, bring billions of dollars in revenue and other commerce and are used in medical research to help cure lethal diseases like cancer and bacterial or viral infections. Climate change proves to be the catalyst for the extinction of the reefs but commercial fishing is adding fuel to the fire as they catch large swaths of fish whose waste is food for the coral reefs. From the coral reefs of the Middle East to the Caribbean Corals, 90% of the large fish that prospered there for millennia have now disappeared.

Trawling: One of the most destructive commercial activities 

Of all commercial fishing activities, trawling is the most destructive and detrimental to marine life. It expedites the death of the ocean on an accelerated level. “It simply sweeps up everything at the bottom, destroying a diversity of life that has existed for as long as the earth has,” says Dr Les Watling, Process of Oceanography at the University of Maine. Most of the bycatch happens in Trawling as by its nature it's unselective and any species bigger than mesh size would be caught regardless of their target. To put into perspective, deforestation causes the loss of 25 million acres of land every year that’s equivalent to losing 27 soccer fields per minute. Trawling wipes out 3.9 billion acres every year which is losing 4,316 soccer fields every minute. 

Conclusion

Although a number of environmental agencies are working on the ground to eliminate the unsustainable methods used by profit-making companies that pose an existential threat to the marine population, the influence of these giant killer houses is greater than their efforts. Researchers suggest that 30% of the Ocean must be protected to maximize fisheries yield, intact biodiversity and safeguard biodiversity but in reality, only 5% of the Ocean is now protected, that is misleading because 95% of that allows fishing which means that only 1% of the ocean in “highly protected.” We are on the brink of losing the marine population and so the population on land because if the Ocean dies so do the humans.

“If you want to address Climate Change, the first thing you do is to protect the Ocean and the solution to that is very simple; leave it alone.”

Captain Paul Watson, Founder of the Sea Shepherd Conversation Society