Hello! My name is Megan, an 18-year-old ocean activist living in Miami, Florida. Going to a school across the street from an amazing view of the ocean, I have found myself ever-so enthralled in its seemingly infinite beauty. I've also realized the desperate state the ocean is in from society's poor choices--things like over-fishing, illegal whaling, and, you guessed it, pollution.
Most people these days are concerned with "going green" and are determined to make their lives more eco-friendly. What many fail to realize is that while being green is admirable, something far larger is at stake from mankind's poor choices than the soil on which we walk, and that is the ocean. Perhaps we should all change our way of thinking and try on an outfit of a different color--blue.
After all; if the oceans die, we die.
One study found that roughly 4.5 million sea animals are killed as bycatch in longline fishing every year, including roughly 3.3 million sharks, 1 million marlins, 60,000 sea turtles, 75,000 albatross, and 20,000 dolphins and whales.
Even longlines, though, don’t produce the immense bycatch associated with trawling. The most common type of modern shrimp trawler sweeps an area roughly twenty-five to thirty meters wide. The trawl is pulled along the ocean bottom at 4.5 to 6.5 kmh for several hours, sweeping shrimp (and everything else) into the far end of a funnel-shaped net. Trawling, almost always for shrimp, is the marine equivalent of clear-cutting rain forest. Whatever they target, trawlers sweep up fish, sharks, rays, crabs, squid, scallops - typically about a hundred different fish and other species. Virtually all die.
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