HOW TO SAVE THE SEA
British marine biologist and TV presenter Monty Halls is launching a new initiative to give our oceans a health check, offering some simple solutions on how we can help fight threats to marine life
INTERVIEWED BY SCOTT DUTFIELD
What are the biggest threats to the world’s oceans? They are a myriad. Microplastics are a massive issue – as we know, there isn’t anywhere in the ocean that there are no microplastics now. It’s at every level of the food chain and it bioaccumulates, moving up the food chain. It’s in us now, without a doubt. Then there’s climate change. What we’re looking at now is pulses of increase in temperature or temperature change in large bodies of water. That has a massive impact on the vertical migrations of plankton and also their life cycles.
Then there’s overfishing, which is a massive issue. We’re still sort of hitting the krill and things in the Southern Ocean, which is a basis of an entire food chain. You’ve also got ocean acidification and pollution. You know, it’s not great. But you’ve also got little stories of hope emerging and some very interesting projects.
DID YOU KNOW?
Between February 2023 and April 2024, coral reef bleaching was reported in 53 countries
Over the last four decades, around 99 per cent of oceanic whitetips have been lost from the Gulf of Mexico
For example, harvesting microplastics to turn them into biodiesel. I spoke to Richard Thompson from the University of Plymouth, who’s probably one of the leading experts in the world about microplastics, and asked, “When you look forward, how do you feel?” And he said, “I feel optimistic. I feel we can utilise this resource for good.” We just need to figure out the technology to do it, and we need to stop dumping stuff in the sea.