The Deep Blue Beyond
Posted By Divers Alert Network on 27 October 2004
By Robert N. Rossier
The world is a complex place. I come to realize this each and every time I turn on the news, log onto the internet, or turn the pages of the local paper. Heck, I can't even make heads or tails of the local politics in our small town here in rural New England. Beyond the boundaries of our hometown, the mysteries multiply well beyond my comprehension.
At the new Ocean Realm exhibit at the AmericanMuseum of Natural History in New York City, they've managed to condense the planet's underwater inhabitants and ecosystems into a single hall. Detailed dioramas depicting the multitudinous marine ecosystems lie beneath a breathtaking sculpture of a 90-foot blue whale. Like a can of Campbell's Alphabet Soup(tm), one finds within this exhibit all the basic building blocks, and can extrapolate to the limits of wild imagination. Everything from algae, barnacles, crabs and diatoms to wolf fish, Xiphiidae (swordfish and billfish), yellowfin and zooxanthellae (small algalike plant cells found in the tissues of corals and other species) are represented in their finest form. Just add water, and the contents cook up to a delightful dish, simmering with the very flavors of life itself here on the blue planet.
To a great extent, the exhibits make sense of an otherwise chaotic concoction of organisms. In one display, specimens are organized according to modern scientific classification. At a glance, we can see how the various species fit together in an astounding array, with anatomical complexity increasing as we wind our way up the evolutionary ladder. It's fascinating to see how hundreds of years of study and scientific research have culminated in an understanding of how many pieces fit into a complex system of life.
Losing Pieces of the Puzzle
Yet, our understanding is far from complete, and we continue to lose pieces of the biological puzzle faster than we can fit them together. Next door in the biodiversity hall, we learn that as many as 30,000 species disappear from the face of our planet each year. It's sobering news, and the evidence that this is so surrounds us.
A recent study released by the World Wildlife Fund states that nearly a thousand whales, dolphins and porpoises die each day as a result of "bycatch" in the global commercial fishing industry. In an interview with reporter Joseph Verrengia published on CompuServe News, Andy Read of Duke University Marine Laboratory in Beaufort, N.C. reportedly commented, "Several species will be lost in the next few decades if nothing happens."
Meanwhile, in my own back yard, a massive die-off of lobsters in Long Island Sound is thought to be a result of environmental pressures such as pollution, sewage, rising temperatures, lowering oxygen levels, and the use of pesticides to ward off the West Nile virus, according to reports in The Day (of New London, Conn.). The list goes on, and it does seem at times that we are the most dangerous species on the planet.
Still, the challenge of our times is to understand what is here on Earth - to identify the species, catalog them, and piece together the intricate ecological structures they form and fit within.
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