[Atlantic] ...someone in this generation will be the last human to eat a bluefin tuna

Humans aren't natural, duh. Humans are man made.

 

Natural ecological systems are, generally, sustainable. The human population is not.

 

Humans are a product of biological evolution. Our technology isn't.

 

good thing we still have all that chicken in the sea

 

Thanks for that link. A lot of cool inventions this year I had no idea about.

 

Maybe we can put these in our sushi

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/33959849/ns/world_news-world_environment/?GT1=43001

Giant jellyfish swarm north in warming world
Expanding range is ‘warning sign that our oceans are stressed,’ expert saysKOKONOGI, Japan - A blood-orange blob the size of a small refrigerator emerged from the dark waters, its venomous tentacles trapped in a fishing net. Within minutes, hundreds more were being hauled up, a pulsating mass crowding out the catch of mackerel and sea bass.

The fishermen leaned into the nets, grunting and grumbling as they tossed the translucent jellyfish back into the bay, giants weighing up to 450 pounds, marine invaders that are putting the men's livelihoods at risk.

The venom of the Nomura, the world's largest jellyfish, a creature up to 6 feet in diameter, can ruin a whole day's catch by tainting or killing fish stung when ensnared with them in the maze of nets here in northwest Japan's Wakasa Bay.

"Some fishermen have just stopped fishing," said Taiichiro Hamano, 67. "When you pull in the nets and see jellyfish, you get depressed."

This year's jellyfish swarm is one of the worst he has seen, Hamano said. Once considered a rarity occurring every 40 years, they are now an almost annual occurrence along several thousand miles of Japanese coast, and far beyond Japan.

Scientists believe climate change — the warming of oceans — has allowed some of the almost 2,000 jellyfish species to expand their ranges, appear earlier in the year and increase overall numbers, much as warming has helped ticks, bark beetles and other pests to spread to new latitudes.

Terrorizing beachgoers
The gelatinous seaborne creatures are blamed for decimating fishing industries in the Bering and Black seas, forcing the shutdown of seaside power and desalination plants in Japan, the Middle East and Africa, and terrorizing beachgoers worldwide, the U.S. National Science Foundation says.

A 2008 foundation study cited research estimating that people are stung 500,000 times every year — sometimes multiple times — in Chesapeake Bay on the U.S. East Coast, and 20 to 40 die each year in the Philippines from jellyfish stings.

In 2007, a salmon farm in Northern Ireland lost its more than 100,000 fish to an attack by the mauve stinger, a jellyfish normally known for stinging bathers in warm Mediterranean waters. Scientists cite its migration to colder Irish seas as evidence of global warming.

Increasingly polluted waters — off China, for example — boost growth of the microscopic plankton that "jellies" feed upon, while overfishing has eliminated many of the jellyfish's predators and cut down on competitors for plankton feed.

"These increases in jellyfish should be a warning sign that our oceans are stressed and unhealthy," said Lucas Brotz, a University of British Columbia researcher.

Here on the rocky Echizen coast, amid floodlights and the roar of generators, fishermen at Kokonogi's bustling port made quick work of the day's catch — packaging glistening fish and squid in Styrofoam boxes for shipment to market.

In rain jackets and hip waders, they crowded around a visitor to tell how the jellyfish have upended a way of life in which men worked fishing trawlers on the high seas in their younger days and later eased toward retirement by joining one of the cooperatives operating nets set in the bay.

It was a good living, they said, until the jellyfish began inundating the bay in 2002, sometimes numbering 500 million, reducing fish catches by 30 percent and slashing prices by half over concerns about quality.

Two nets in Echizen burst last month during a typhoon because of the sheer weight of the jellyfish, and off the east coast jelly-filled nets capsized a 10-ton trawler as its crew tried to pull them up. The three fishermen were rescued.

"We have been getting rid of jellyfish. But no matter how hard we try, the jellyfish keep coming and coming," said Fumio Oma, whose crew is out of work after their net broke under the weight of thousands of jellyfish. "We need the government's help to get rid of the jellyfish."

The invasions cost the industry up to 30 billion yen ($332 million) a year, and tens of thousands of fishermen have sought government compensation, said scientist Shin-ichi Uye, Japan's leading expert on the problem.

Hearing fishermen's pleas, Uye, who had been studying zooplankton, became obsessed with the little-studied Nomura's jellyfish, scientifically known as Nemopilema nomurai, which at its biggest looks like a giant mushroom trailing dozens of noodle-like tentacles.

"No one knew their life cycle, where they came from, where they reproduced," said Uye, 59. "This jellyfish was like an alien."

He artificially bred Nomura's jellyfish in his Hiroshima University lab, learning about their life cycle, growth rates and feeding habits. He traveled by ferry between China to Japan this year to confirm they were riding currents to Japanese waters.

'More and more dominant'
He concluded China's coastal waters offered a perfect breeding ground: Agricultural and sewage runoff are spurring plankton growth, and fish catches are declining. The waters of the Yellow Sea, meanwhile, have warmed as much as 3 degrees Fahrenheight over the past quarter-century.

"The jellyfish are becoming more and more dominant," said Uye, as he sliced off samples of dead jellyfish on the deck of an Echizen fishing boat. "Their growth rates are quite amazing."

The slight, bespectacled scientist is unafraid of controversy, having lobbied his government tirelessly to help the fishermen, and angered Chinese colleagues by arguing their government must help solve the problem, comparing it to the effects of acid rain that reaches Japan from China.

"The Chinese people say they will think about this after they get rich, but it might be too late by then," he said.

A U.S. marine scientist, Jennifer Purcell of Western Washington University, has found a correlation between warming and jellyfish on a much larger scale, in at least 11 locations, including the Mediterranean and North seas, and Chesapeake and Narragansett bays.

"It's hard to deny that there is an effect from warming," Purcell said. "There keeps coming up again and again examples of jellyfish populations being high when it's warmer." Some tropical species, on the other hand, appear to decline when water temperatures rise too high.

Even if populations explode, their numbers may be limited in the long term by other factors, including food and currents. In a paper last year, researchers concluded jellyfish numbers in the Bering Sea — which by 2000 were 40 times higher than in 1982 — declined even as temperatures have hit record highs.

"They were still well ahead of their historic averages for that region," said co-author Lorenzo Ciannelli of Oregon State University. "But clearly jellyfish populations are not merely a function of water temperature."

Long-term fixes required
Addressing the surge in jellyfish blooms in most places will require long-term fixes, such as introducing fishing quotas and pollution controls, as well as capping greenhouse gas emissions to control global warming, experts said.

In the short term, governments are left with few options other than warning bathers or bailing out cash-strapped fishermen. In Japan, the government is helping finance the purchase of newly designed nets, a layered system that snares jellyfish with one kind of net, allowing fish through to be caught in another.

Some entrepreneurs, meanwhile, are trying to cash in. One Japanese company is selling giant jellyfish ice cream, and another plans a pickled plum dip with chunks of giant jellyfish. But, though a popular delicacy, jellyfish isn't likely to replace sushi or other fish dishes on Asian menus anytime soon, in view of its time-consuming processing, heavy sodium overload and unappealing image.

 

really? technology is a product of man which is part of nature, therefore it is natural. The term "natural" is completely useless and bogus imo

 

True the term "natural" is subjective but at the same time you have to consider that most natural systems are self-sustaining. Our technology has completely allowed us to defy the idea of a self-sustaining biological system.

For that matter just because we come from nature doesn't mean that our creations are natural by extension. For instance a lot of material of your body originally came from dirt having been processed by plants which you ate directly or processed by animals which you ate so does that mean you are dirt?

 

What human actions are considered natural and which are not?

I see technology just as human advancement, survival of the fittest, etc. The terms "natural" and "unnatural" are just completely meaningless. I also don't see how the question you posed is similar.

 

Cutting to the chase of what I believe Rhino is talking about is that humans essentially as humans we can do whatever we want and there is no reason to worry about the destruction of species because we happen to be one's with technology.

From an existential point there is something to that but leaving aside any moral arguments we are natural in the sense that we are a product of evolution that came about under certain conditions. To the point that our technology has allowed us to greatly alter the environment that might have some severe repurcussions to us if those conditions change beyond what we are used too. So while we've defied the normal checks on population that keeps a self-sustaining system that just might mean any eventual reckoning will be even more catastrophic.

Whiping out bluefin will not be our undoing but more of a sympton of other problems that might come back to bite us on the @ss.

 

Because you are arguing a transitive property in regards to the term. I was just pointing out such a transitive property doesn't really work.

 

I did not say we should do whatever we want, I said we could. There are obviously negative and positive consequences to anything. My point simply was that it being natural or not has nothing to do with what we should do about it. What we do to create the problem and what we do to solve the problem are both "natural."

 

Also just to point out that with technology it allows us to bend if not break the idea of the survival of the fittests. In a strict Darwinian sense technology has allowed the perseverence of genes and traits that likely would be weeded out. Also as in the case of auto-immune diseases and obesity related diseases our technology is also reducing our fitness by weakening our immune systems and giving us more calories than we can handle.

 

Maybe our technology simply enhances survival of the fittest. Humans have the most technology and are the most dominant creature on the earth. Our advancements does not counteract survival of the fittest, but enhances the idea. but we could go back and forth all day

 

You have to consider though how our technology came about. If we are talkign about natural that would be considered a biological advancement that came about in regard to an environmental factor. Now the development of our brains was a natural advancement that came about through an evolutionary process wheras the creation of a gasoline motor wasn't.

Its not a transitive property.

 

Is a beaver building a dam natural? A bird building a nest?

 

Some of us have a different perspective.

 

To a certain extent no but I think dam and nest building depends on if that is considered a technological act or an instinctual behavior. I don't know enough about them to say but certainly other animals have to been shown to develop a technology, creative tool use, that wouldn't be considered natural.

Lets say though that dam building by beavers is a technological is a good example of the damage that can happen to an environment when there is no check. Like humans, are one of the few animals that can signifigantly alter their environment and if left unchecked can damage an ecosystem.

 

The problem though is that many of us our dependent on our technology for our survival and without us a lot of us would die. Consider if we lost electricity, another creation of our technology, many would die, such as diabetics, without the power to fuel our technology.

In that case technology isn't so much an enhancement of our fitness but a crutch.

 

Agriculture is insanely dependent upon technology. We would have massive human die-off without technology to support our production levels.

Jared Diamond, in light of his research, cautions against trusting in technology as a crutch, as it tends to create as many or more problems than it solves.

Good points Judoka, and well argued.