The Ocean of Life

by Callum Roberts

  30. Gill, B. C., et al., “Geochemical Evidence for Widespread Euxinia in the Later Cambrian Ocean,” Nature 469 (2011): 80–83.

  31. Dahl, T., et al., “Devonian Rise in Atmospheric Oxygen Correlated to the Radiations in Terrestrial Plants and Large Predatory Fish,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107 (2010): 17911–15; Lenton, T. M., “The Role of Land Plants, Phosphorus Weathering and Fire in the Rise and Regulation of Atmospheric Oxygen,” Global Change Biology 7 (2001): 613–29.

  32. Lambert, O., et al., “The Giant Bite of a New Raptorial Sperm Whale from the Miocene Epoch of Peru,” Nature 466 (2010): 105–8.

  33. Gill, B. C., et al., “Geochemical Evidence.”

  34. Benton, M. J., and R. J. Twitchett, “How to Kill (Almost) All Life: The End-Permian Extinction Event,” Trends in Ecology and Evolution 18 (2003): 358–65.

  35. Kidder, D. L., and T. R. Worsley, “Causes and Consequences of Extreme Permo-Triassic Warming to Globally Equable Climate and Relation to the Permo-Triassic Extinction and Recovery,” Palaeo 203 (2004): 207–37.

  36. Knoll, A. H., et al., “Paleophysiology and End-Permian Mass Extinction,” Earth and Planetary Science Letters 256 (2007): 295–313.

  Chapter 2: Food from the Sea

  1. Landau, M., “Human Evolution As Narrative,” American Scientist 72 (1984): 262–67.

  2. Verhaegen, M., et al., “The Original Econiche of the Genus Homo: Open Plain or Waterside?” in S. I. Munoz, ed., Ecology Research Progress (New York: Nova Science Publishers, 2007), pp. 155–86.

  3. Recently the term hominin has refined previous use of hominid. Hominin includes humans and all their ancestors, while hominid refers to all of the great apes (including us) and their ancestors.

  4. Tishkoff, S. A., et al., “The Genetic Structure and History of Africans and African Americans,” Science 324 (2009): 1035–44.

  5. Marean, C. W., et al., “Early Human Use of Marine Resources and Pigment in South Africa During the Middle Pleistocene,” Nature 449 (2007): 905–8.

  6. Although Blombos was occupied for longer, it wasn’t inhabited as early on as Pinnacle Point.

  7. Brown, K. S., et al., “Fire as an Engineering Tool of Early Modern Humans,” Science 325 (2009): 859–62.

  8. Braun, D. R., et al., “Early Hominin Diet Included Diverse Terrestrial and Aquatic Animals 1.95 Ma in East Turkana, Kenya,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107 (2010): 10002–7.

  9. For a long time it was thought that Neanderthals and modern humans overlapped in their habitation of Europe. But new dates for deposits seem to contradict that, pushing back the dates of the last Neanderthals to before our arrival. However, researchers from Spain suggest that their dates of thirty-two thousand years ago are robust. No doubt the debate will continue. http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2011/05/were-neandertals-and-modern-huma.html?ref=hp, accessed May 18, 2012; Stringer, C. B., et al., “Neanderthal Exploitation of Marine Mammals in Gibraltar,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 105 (2008): 14319–24.

  10. Clottes, J., and J. Courtin, The Cave Beneath the Sea: Paleolithic Images at Cosquer (New York: H. N. Abrams, New York, 1996).

  11. Erlandson, J. M., “The Archaeology of Aquatic Adaptations: Paradigms for a New Millennium,” Journal of Archaeological Research 9 (2001): 287–348; Erlandson, J. M., et al., “The Kelp Highway Hypothesis: Marine Ecology, the Coastal Migration Theory, and the Peopling of the Americas,” Journal of Island and Coastal Archaeology 2 (2007): 161–74.

  12. There is evidence for earlier sea journeys by other hominins. For example, Homo erectus made it to the island of Flores in Indonesia between eight hundred thousand and seven hundred thousand years ago, involving a couple of short sea journeys. Those journeys would never have required them to be out of sight of land, however. Similarly, Neanderthals probably crossed short stretches of sea in the Mediterranean before twenty-two thousand years ago (Erlandson 2001).

  13. Hine, P., et al., “Antiquity of Stone-Walled Tidal Fish Traps on the Cape Coast, South Africa,” South African Archaeological Bulletin 65 (2010): 35–44.

  14. O’Connor, S., et al. “Pelagic Fishing at 42,000 Years before the Present and the Maritime Skills of Modern Humans,” Science 334 : (2011): 1117–21.

  15. Erlandson, J. M., et al., “Fishing up the Food Web?: 12,000 Years of Maritime Subsistence and Adaptive Adjustments on California’s Channel Islands,” Pacific Science 63 (2009): 711–24.

  16. Geoff Bailey, University of York, personal communication.

  17. Johannes, R. E., Words of the Lagoon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981).

  18. Kvavadze, E., et al., “30,000-Year-Old Wild Flax Fibers,” Science 325 (2009): 1359.

  19. Soffer, O., “Recovering Perishable Technologies Through Use-Wear on Tools: Preliminary Evidence for Upper Palaeolithic Weaving and Net-making,” Current Anthropology 45 (2004): 407–13.

  20. Erlandson, J. M., and T. C. Rick, “Archaeology, Historical Ecology, and the Future of Ocean Ecosystems,” in T. C. Rick and J. M. Erlandson, eds., Human Impacts on Ancient Marine Ecosystems (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), pp. 297–308.

  21. Walters, I., “Fish Hooks: Evidence for Dual Social Systems in Southeastern Australia?” Australian Archaeology 27 (1988): 98–114.

  22. Radcliffe, W., Fishing from Earliest Times (London: John Murray, 1921).

  23. Oppian’s Halieuticks. Of the Nature of Fishes and Fishing of the Ancients, in Mair, A. W., Oppian, Colluthus and Tryphiodorus, with an English translation (London: William Heinemann, 1928).

  24. It is a testament to the popularity of Oppian’s poem that fifty-eight contemporary copies survive. Bartley, A. N., Stories from the Mountains, Stories from the Sea: The Digressions and Similes of Oppian’s Halieutica and Cynegetica (Gottingen, Germany: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2003).

  25. Trakadas, A., “The Archaeological Evidence for Fish Processing in the Western Mediterranean,” in T. Bekker-Nielsen, ed., Ancient Fishing and Fish Processing in the Black Sea Region (Copenhagen: Aarhus University Press, 2003), pp. 47–82.

  26. Oppian’s Halieuticks.

  27. It might also be effective for catching large bottom dwellers like skates and rays.

  28. Gosnell, M., Ice: The Nature, the History, and the Uses of an Astonishing Substance, (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2007).

  29. Radcliffe, Fishing from the Earliest Times.

  30. Corcoran, T. H., “Roman Fish Sauces,” The Classical Journal 58 (1963): 204–10.

  31. Ibid.

  32. Aquerreta, Y., et al., “Use of Exogenous Enzymes to Elaborate the Roman Fish Sauce ‘Garum,’” Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture 82 (2002): 107–12.

  33. Curtis, R. I., “Source for Production and Trade of Greek and Roman Processed Fish,” in Bekker-Nielsen, ed. Ancient Fishing and Fish Processing, pp. 31–46.

  34. Ejstrud, B., “Size Matters: Estimating Trade of Wine, Oil and Fish-sauce from Amphorae in the First Century AD,” in Bekker-Nielsen, ed., Ancient Fishing and Fish Processing, pp. 171–82.

  35. Barrett, J. H., et al., “The Origins of Intensive Marine Fishing in Medieval Europe: The English Evidence,” Proceedings of the Royal Society B 271 (2004): 2417–21; Barrett J. H. et al., “Dark Age Economics Revisited: The English Fish Bone Evidence AD 600–1600,” Antiquity 78 (2004): 618–36.

  36. Barrett, J. H., et al., “Detecting the Medieval Cod Trade: A New Method and First Results,” Journal of Archaeological Science 35 (2008): 850–61.

  37. Merwe, P. van der, ed., Hooking, Drifting and Trawling: 500 Years of British Deep Sea Fishing (London: National Maritime Museum, 1986).

  38. Roberts, C. M., The Unnatural History of the Sea (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2007).

  39. Duhamel du Monceau, M., Traité Général des Pesches et Histoire des Poissons (Paris: Saillant and Nyon, 1769).

  40. Johannes, Words of the Lagoon.

  41. Webster, G., “The Invention of the Kite,” The Kiteflyer 98
(2004): 9–14.

  Chapter 3: Fewer Fish in the Sea

  1. Smith, J., The Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles (London: I. D. and I. H. for Michael Sparkes, 1624; repr., Glasgow: J. MacLehose, 1907).

  2. Thurstan, R. H. et al., “The Effects of 118 Years of Industrial Fishing on UK Bottom Trawl Fisheries,” Nature Communications 1 (2010): 15; doi: 10.1038/ncomms1013.

  3. We are very grateful to G .H. Engelhard for the calculations that made our analysis possible. Engelhard, G. H. “One Hundred and Twenty Years of Change in Fishing Power of English North Sea Trawlers,” in A. Payne, J. Cotter, and T. Potter, eds., Advances in Fisheries Science 50 years on from Beverton and Holt (Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing, 2008), pp. 1–25.

  4. Fish like menhaden were often caught in such vast numbers they were used as fertilizer, since most of the catch spoiled before it could be sold for human consumption and only a limited amount could be fed to available livestock. Brown Goode, G., The Fisheries and Fishery Industries of the United States: Natural History of Useful Aquatic Animals (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1884), Sect. I.

  5. Hoover, H., “The Food Armies of Liberty. The Winning Weapon: Food,” National Geographic (September 1917): 187–212.

  6. Collins, J. W., Report on the Investigation of Fishing Grounds in the Gulf of Mexico (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1887).

  7. Lewis Anspach, as quoted in The Literary Gazette and Journal of Belles Lettres for the Year 1819 (London: William Pople, 1820).

  8. Wallace, S., and B. Gisborne, Basking Sharks: The Slaughter of BC’s Gentle Giants (Vancouver: New Star Books, 2006).

  9. One vivid account from Ireland in 1744 describes the slaughter of a large group of porpoises: “Yesterday being a great spring tide, a vast army of porpusses came up Lough Foyle in pursuit of salmon. As they rolled by Londonderry, the sailors pursued them in their boats, and killed them all the way, drove them six miles farther up the lough, to the flats about Mount Gavelling. There a new chase began by our fishermen and country people, who stretched a net across the lough, and drove them up to the narrow passages of the Great Island, which lies a mile below this town; there they fell on them with guns, swords, hatchets, and all kinds of weapons, and made a terrible slaughter. There were killed here above one hundred and sixty, besides as many mortally wounded and carried off by the flood. Including those the men of Londonderry killed, there have at least fallen in this battle five hundred porpoises, generally weighing from 1,000 to 1,500 [pounds] weight, and very good oil. Some of them were full of young ones as big as calves; and some had from six to ten salmon in their stomachs. But we hope that since these grand devourers are destroyed, our fishing will hereafter flourish, and we are pretty well repaid by this oil for the damage they have done.” From the Post-Boy, dated November 12, 1744, and quoted in T. de Voe, The Market Assistant, containing a brief description of every article of human food sold in the public markets of the cities of New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Brooklyn (New York: Orange, Judd and Company, 1866). The weights quoted seem too high for porpoises, suggesting they may have been dolphins.

  10. National Marine Fisheries Service, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, “2010 Report to Congress. Status of U.S. Fisheries,” Washington, DC, 2011; www.nmfs.noaa.gov/sfa/statusoffisheries/2010/2010_Report_to_Congress.pdf; accessed November 18, 2011.

  11. Continental shelves are the shallow areas adjacent to landmasses and are typically less than about 650 feet deep. Watling, L., and E. A. Norse, “Disturbance of the Seabed by Mobile Fishing Gear: A Comparison to Forest Clearcutting,” Conservation Biology 12 (1998): 1180–97.

  12. Bertram, J. G., The Harvest of the Sea (London: John Murray, 1873).

  13. Bailey, D. M., et al., “Long-term Changes in Deep-water Fish Populations in the Northeast Atlantic: A Deeper Reaching Effect of Fisheries?” Proceedings of the Royal Society B (2009); doi: 10.1098/rspb.2009.0098.

  14. The study in which this figure first appeared (Myers, R. A., and B. Worm, “Rapid Worldwide Depletion of Predatory Fish Communities,” Nature 423 [2003]: 280–83) has been hotly argued over since it came out and the figures questioned. Some critics say the wrong analysis was used and that all fish stocks will have collapsed by early in the twenty-second century rather than the mid-twenty-first. Others contend that catches are an inappropriate metric of the condition of fish stocks, given that they depend on fishing effort as well as how many fish are in the sea. In fact, the authors never suggested that all fish stocks would be gone by 2048, just that they might all have experienced collapse, defined as catches falling below 10 percent of their maximum. It is perfectly possible for some collapsed fisheries to have recovered by then, and for others to still produce fish, but in much lower quantities than they could at higher abundance. The picture has been revised in recent years (Worm, B., et al., “Rebuilding Global Fisheries,” Science 325 [2009]: 578–85) to reflect efforts to recover fish stocks in the United States and elsewhere, and to account for differences when biomass rather than catches are used as measures of the condition of stocks (Branch, T. A., et al., “Contrasting Global Trends in Marine Fishery Status Obtained from Catches and from Stock Assessments,” Conservation Biology [2011] doi: 10.1111/j.1523-1739.2011.01687.x), but the picture looks bleak at a global scale.

  15. Rick, T. C., and J. M. Erlandson, eds., Human Impacts on Ancient Marine Ecosystems (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008).

  16. Swain, D. P., et al., “Evolutionary Response to Size-Selective Mortality in an Exploited Fish Population,” Proceedings of the Royal Society B 274 (2007): 1015–22; Mollet, F. M., et al., “Fisheries-Induced Evolutionary Changes in Maturation Reaction Norms in North Sea Sole Solea solea,” Marine Ecology Progress Series 351 (2007): 189–99.

  17. Hsieh C., et al., “Fishing Elevates Variability in the Abundance of Exploited Species,” Nature 443 (2006): 859–62.

  18. Daniel Pauly coined the phrase fishing down the food web (Pauly, D., et al., “Fishing Down Marine Food Webs,” Science 279 [1998]: 860–63). The phenomenon has been questioned by some scientists who suggest that what is happening is fishing through the food web (Essington, T. E., et al., “Fishing Through Marine Food Webs,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 103 [2006]: 3171–75) and that species are simply added to the fishery over time as the big ones are still caught, or that the effect doesn’t exist (Branch, T. A., et al., “The Trophic Fingerprint of Marine Fisheries,” Nature 468 [2010]: 431–35). However you slice it, serial depletion of big fish is easy to see wherever there is a gradient of fishing pressure. Intensively exploited places lack the biggest species and big individuals that less fished places have. Although the phenomenon is most often cited in relation to trophic level in the food web, in reality trophic level is just a correlate of what drives fishermen, which is profit. So fishers are really fishing down the value chain (Sethi, S. A., et al., “Global Fishery Development Patterns are Driven by Profit but Not Trophic Level,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107 [2010]: 12163–67).

  19. Discovery of a new cod depot. Quoted in Friends’ Intelligencer XVIII (Philadelphia: T. Ellwood Zell, 1890), pp. 618–19.

  20. Beaufoy, H., “Third Report from the Committee Appointed to Inquire into the State of the British Fisheries, and into the Most Effectual Means for Their Improvement and Extension.” Sixteenth Parliament of Great Britain, 2nd sess., (January 25, 1785–August 2, 1785). In Reports from the Committees of the House of Commons 1715–1801, Miscellaneous Subjects Vol. 10: 1785–1801(1803), pp. 18–189.

  21. Thurstan, R. H., and C. M. Roberts, “Ecological Meltdown in the Firth of Clyde, Scotland: Two Centuries of Change in a Coastal Marine Ecosystem,” PLoS ONE 5 (2010): e11767. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0011767.

  22. www.dunoon-observer.com/index.php/news/past-stories-covered-in-cowal-and-argyll/549-fishermens-leaders-slam-clyde-report; accessed December 27, 2011.

  23. O’Leary, B., et al., “Fisheries Mism
anagement,” Marine Pollution Bulletin (2011) 62: 2642–48.

  24. Fromentin J. M., “Lessons from the Past: Investigating Historical Data from Bluefin Tuna Fisheries,” Fish and Fisheries 10 (2009): 197–216.

  25. MacKenzie, B. R., et al., “Impending Collapse of Bluefin Tuna in the Northeast Atlantic and Mediterranean” Conservation Letters 2 (2009): 25–34.

  Chapter 4: Winds and Currents

  1. Lozier, M. S., “Deconstructing the Conveyor Belt,” Science 328 (2010): 1507–11.

  2. Had they been able to measure deeper, they would have found the temperature drop to just 37°F or 39oF.

  3. Benjamin, Count of Rumford, “An Account of the Manner in Which Heat Is Propagated in Fluids, and Its General Consequences in the Economy of the Universe,” A Journal of Natural Philosophy, Chemistry and the Arts 1 (London: William Nicholson, 1757).

  4. Denny, M. W., How the Ocean Works: An Introduction to Oceanography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008).

  5. The total flow of world rivers is approximately 40,700 km3 per year. The Amazon accounts for 15 percent of this flow. The flow of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, as the Atlantic arm of the Global Ocean Conveyor current is known, is about 490,000 km3 per year, or just one third of 1 percent of the volume of the sea. Willis, J. K., “Can In Situ Floats and Satellite Altimeters Detect Long-term Changes in Atlantic Ocean Overturning?” Geophysical Research Letters 37 (2010): art. L06602; Postel, S. L., et al., “Human Appropriation of Renewable Fresh Water,” Science 271 (1996): 785–88.

  6. Lenton T. M., et al., “Tipping Elements in the Earth’s Climate System,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Science 105 (2008): 1786–93.

  7. Arrhenius won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1903, not for the spectacular leap of logic he made in predicting global warming, but for his theory of the dissociation of ions in solution.