Amid the horror, more horror.

This has been the kind of day to really depress a girl.

This story is everywhere today, but was mostly buried by the global economic collapse-frenzy.

This is the kind of shit that makes you lose your mind. And meanwhile that block, that stone, that less than senseless thing Palin has been shooting wolves from helicopters. Seriously, can anyone not be freaking out?

Article chosen from the Washington Post, because they are the least dramatic version of this I can find, so no one can say I've posted this for drama- if you want more sources for this, hit here.

"25% of Wild Mammal Species Face Extinction
Global Assessment Paints 'Bleak Picture,' Scientists Say, and Figure of Those at Risk Could Be Higher

At least a quarter of the world's wild mammal species are at risk of extinction, according to a comprehensive global survey released here Monday.

The new assessment -- which took 1,700 experts in 130 countries five years to complete -- paints "a bleak picture," leaders of the project wrote in a paper being published in the journal Science. The overview, made public at the quadrennial World Conservation Congress of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), covers all 5,487 wild species identified since 1500. It is the most thorough tally of land and marine mammals since 1996.

"Mammals are definitely declining, and the driving factors are habitat destruction and over-harvesting," said Jan Schipper, the paper's lead writer and the IUCN's global mammals assessment coordinator. The researchers concluded that 25 percent of the mammal species for which they had sufficient data are threatened with extinction, but Schipper added that the figure could be as high as 36 percent because information on some species is so scarce.

Land and marine mammals face different threats, the scientists said, and large mammals are more vulnerable than small ones. For land species, habitat loss and hunting represent the greatest danger, while marine mammals are more threatened by unintentional killing by pollution, ship strikes and being caught in fishing nets." LINK

Interview with the Somali pirates. They didn't say "Yarrgghh, matey" and they like spaghetti.

“We just saw a big ship,” the pirates’ spokesman, Sugule Ali, told The New York Times. “So we stopped it.”

...In a 45-minute-long interview, Mr. Sugule expounded on everything from what the pirates want — “just money” — to why they were doing this — “to stop illegal fishing and dumping in our waters” — to what they eat — rice, meat, bread, spaghetti, “you know, normal human-being food.”
He said that so far, in the eyes of the world, the pirates had been misunderstood. “We don’t consider ourselves sea bandits,” he said. “We consider sea bandits those who illegally fish in our seas and dump waste in our seas and carry weapons in our seas. We are simply patrolling our seas. Think of us like a coast guard.” LINK

Well, then. That certainly clears it up.

Seabirds not breeding.

"The poor breeding of Scotland's seabirds is giving cause for "serious concern", according to RSPB Scotland.
Early reports from coastal reserves indicate continuing problems for the internationally important populations of guillemots, kittiwakes and others.
Nests have been abandoned, with cliffs which "should be teeming" now empty.
..."At our Copinsay reserve on Orkney, the kittiwake population has plummeted drastically since the mid 1980s, when there were at least 10,000 birds on the cliffs, but today there are just under 2,000."
He added: "The declines are primarily being driven by changes in the availability of the fish that these birds depend on.
"Seabirds are indicators of the health of the marine environment and, like the canary in the coalmine, the decline in their fortunes should be a wake-up call to us all that we must pay attention to." LINK

Tuna fish, headed out?

Ack.
"Urgent measures to save falling stocks of tuna in the world's second-biggest tuna fishery, the eastern Pacific, must be launched at a key international meeting this week, conservationists are demanding.
Closures of the fishery, both by area and by time, must be brought in to protect tumbling Pacific populations of skipjack and bigeye tuna, leading environmental groups warn.
..."Bigeye and yellowfin tuna populations are falling and the average size of captured fish is shrinking, a clear sign that those tuna are in dire need of conservation measures," the environmental groups say.
How to eat sustainably
Opportunities for consuming tuna in an environmentally friendly way are steadily diminishing. In the past the concern was for the "bycatch" species – that is, where other marine creatures such as dolphins were being accidentally caught. Accordingly, tuna could be certified as "dolphin-friendly". But now concern has moved on to the tuna itself. There is only one tuna fishery – the American Albacore Fishing Association in San Diego, California – which is certified as sustainable by the Marine Stewardship Council. Other fisheries are cause for concern, but the worst is thought to be the Mediterranean and Atlantic fishery for bluefin tuna, which conservationists consider to be close to collapse. Recently the World Wide Fund for Nature called for a boycott by retailers, restaurants and consumers of Mediterranean bluefin tuna so that the species might have a chance to recover before it is too late." LINK

Sharks, headed out?

"Some shark populations in the Mediterranean Sea have completely collapsed, according to a new study, with numbers of five species declining by more than 96 percent over the past two centuries.
...Particularly troubling, the researchers said, were patterns indicating a lack of females of breeding age, which are essential if populations are to recover even with new conservation measures.
Sharks take years to reach sexual maturity and, unlike most other fishes, produce small numbers of young, making them particularly vulnerable to overfishing. Populations have declined worldwide, but experts say the Mediterranean — bordered by many countries with diverse rules and fished intensively for centuries — has had bigger losses of sharks and other large predatory fish, including tuna." LINK

So long, and thanks for all the... wait, where's the fish?

Sorry, fish.
Right, so everyone knows that fish are out around 2050, right? Well, some guy wrote a book about it, ( actually , Charles Clover wrote The End of the Line: How Overfishing Is Changing the World and What We Eat) which is being roundly ignored, but there are some gems from this Salon interview with him. Check it out.
"I didn't say in my book, "Don't eat fish." I say, "Don't eat certain fish, don't eat endangered fish." If a fish takes 20 years to double its population, that's a long time. If it takes 30 years before it breeds, don't touch it. But if you eat something that's fast reproducing and not overfished, you should be all right. And there's quite a lot of those species out there. You can eat a hell of a lot of shellfish, a huge amount of mussels and oysters, and your deep-water scallops, with a clear conscience. You can have a really nice fish stew, it's not a problem. But why eat endangered fish? And the slow-reproducing ones are probably going to have mercury in them anyway, so it's a win-win.
I think [cutting back on endangered fish] would be enough of a message to the fishermen of the world and the industries. God knows we're eating a lot of them at the moment. If you go to New York, restaurants seem actively to encourage it. "

Fucking New York.
LINK to great interview

Where fish live fast and die young

Yup, actual phrase from article. So you know it's a good one.

No, really the article is about government subsidies in the UK going to fishermen/women/people who are plundering the last of the fish in the world.

" "The unregulated catches of these roving bandits are utterly unsustainable.

"The solution is not going into the deep sea but better managing the shallow waters where fish live fast and die young, and ecosystems have a greater potential for resilience," he said."
LINK

fish fish fish fish fish. One third of fish species in Yellow River dead

"Human encroachment, pollution, overfishing and dam-building have killed one third of fish species in the Yellow River, China's second-longest waterway. Its increasingly desperate plight is also threatening economic growth."
LINK