![]() ![]() Twenty years later, those toads are mostly gone-likely decimated by chytrid fungus infections. ![]() To explain with a non-oceanic example, my own childhood memories of summers in California's Inland Empire include street gutters choked with thousands of California toads. The term refers to our tendency to perceive our own early experiences of ecology as the norm, in contrast to what we see later in life. "Shifting baselines" have to do with everyone's gut-level perception of the natural world. There's actually a sociological term for this phenomenon: it's called a shifting baseline. Every single one! But no one mourns the trilobites and blastoids, and that actually helps illustrate why we fail to grasp that we're annihilating life in the oceans. All the trilobites and blastoids died, for instance. But whatever the cause, 286 out of 329 marine invertebrate genera we know of died back then. To be clear, the Great Dying wasn't 100 percent caused by warming either. (Right now, we're hauling up 90 percent of fish stocks globally, according to the UN.) In other words, we're killing as many fish as we possibly can as a byproduct of our industries, and then on top of that, we're also eating as many as we can. There are rates at which we can supposedly fish sustainably-meaning in such a way that we don't run out-but the fishing industry operates in volumes that meet, or surpass the peak equilibrium rate. We eat the sea's living creatures-which is the number-one cause of their declining numbers.According to a 2018 paper published in Science magazine, dead zones make up four times as much of the oceans as they did in 1950. Fertilizer and pesticides poison the ocean, and when combined with the above factors, they help create "dead zones," nearly oxygen-free patches of ocean where almost nothing can live.Ocean acidification-the other major side effect of CO2 emissions besides global warming-is causing countless die-offs, most famously in corals, the backbone of coral reefs, the most biodiverse ecosystems on earth.(Although, for the record, at this rate it will take a few more centuries for this effect to reach the lifeforms at the deepest depths of the oceans.) ![]()
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