Pass the Hagfish

Over at Shifting Baselines, Randy Olson and crew have raised the bar for themselves with a website re-launch and (grab your digicams, everybody!) film contest. The media-savvy ocean advocates are asking budding filmmakers to submit 60-second flix that will raise awareness of our oceans and the drastic changes they are undergoing.

What kind of changes, you ask? Well, I'll give just one example, lifted from the Altered Oceans series I keep flogging.

In many places - the atolls of the Pacific, the shrimp beds of the Eastern Seaboard, the fjords of Norway - some of the most advanced forms of ocean life are struggling to survive while the most primitive are thriving and spreading. Fish, corals and marine mammals are dying while algae, bacteria and jellyfish are growing unchecked. Where this pattern is most pronounced, scientists evoke a scenario of evolution running in reverse, returning to the primeval seas of hundreds of millions of years ago. ...

"We're pushing the oceans back to the dawn of evolution," [Dr. Jeremy] Jackson [a marine ecologist and paleontologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla as well as a founding member of Shifting Baselines] said, "a half-billion years ago when the oceans were ruled by jellyfish and bacteria." ...

As their traditional catch declines, fishermen around the world now haul in 450,000 tons of jellyfish per year, more than twice as much as a decade ago.

This is a logical step in a process that Daniel Pauly, a fisheries scientist at the University of British Columbia, calls "fishing down the food web." Fishermen first went after the largest and most popular fish, such as tuna, swordfish, cod and grouper. When those stocks were depleted, they pursued other prey, often smaller and lower on the food chain.

"We are eating bait and moving on to jellyfish and plankton," Pauly said. ...

Pauly, 60, predicts that future generations will see nothing odd or unappetizing about a plateful of these gelatinous blobs.

And there you have it: fishing down the food chain -- just one example of shifting baselines. And something to think about over your next order of hagfish and chips.