Ocean biodiversity and ecology
Prehistoric queen conch shell midden on the British Virgin Islands (Credit: Flickr: Conch graveyard)
In my previous post on the humanization of the Caribbean Sea I traced the origins of the first humans—Archaic Age people who fashioned tools out of stone—to settle the vast, island-filled tropical marine system that we now call the Caribbean Sea. In this post I examine how these prehistoric settlers adapted to living on islands that had never experienced any form of human influence, and how their activities began to alter the natural landscapes and surrounding seascapes of these islands over thousands of years.
The Samaná Peninsula on the island of Hispaniola in the Greater Antilles was inhabited by some of the first settlers of the insular Caribbean (Credit: Dave Carr/Getty Images)
In this post I trace the origin of the first people to settle the vast, island-filled tropical marine system that we now call the Caribbean Sea. This was the first step in the modification by humans of this pristine seascape—the last region of the Americas to be exposed to the presence of humans.
The Caribbean Sea provides an exemplary case study of the course of humanization of an insular seascape over thousands of years. I will argue over a series of blogs that just as we had the power to radically modify and damage the Caribbean Sea, we also have the power to reimagine its future and restore species abundance, rebuild its ecosystems, and create an ecologically productive, resilient, and much more beautiful tropical marine environment than the one we have at present.
Green turtles in the pre-Columbian Caribbean Sea once numbered in the tens of millions. Today, as a result of over 400 years of intense hunting, only about 300,000 remain, or around 0.3 per cent of historical numbers. Adult green turtles feed mainly on turtle grass and in the past they acted as ecosystem engineers by structuring and maintaining healthy seagrass habitat. Their ecological extinction has had a profound effect on Caribbean marine ecosystems.
Source: cnx.org Author: Aparna Bhaduri https://bit.ly/large-school-fish
Human activities have changed the state of our oceans over hundreds, sometimes thousands, of years, and virtually no marine wilderness now remains anywhere on the planet. Given the grim condition of Anthropocene oceans, current conservation efforts alone will no longer provide meaningful improvement. We must now advocate for a much more ambitious plan of large-scale ocean restoration.
