This famous quote from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams should be known to most of you, but what is possibly less known, is how much fish do we actually have in our great ocean?
We have a long history of performing censuses in each country to better understand population growth of people and even cows and pigs, but we have never done a census of the marine life! This means that we possibly know very little about the ocean that feeds us, not only as food, but also in terms of what we need to live as the ocean produces about 70% of the oxygen in the atmosphere.
The newly published Census of the marine life is a unique first attempt to better understand the life in the great ocean of our planet. It has been composed by 17 different international projects over 10 years involving more than 2,700 researchers and more than 500 expeditions. The result is more than 1,000 new species to science – and still counting!
The fact that the ocean is to Earth thinner than the skin to an apple, we know very little about the diversity and what is going on in the great depths of the ocean that science just a few years ago was certain did not contain any life forms, but we were all wrong! In 1990 experts estimated that less than 5% of the biodiversity in the ocean had been described. If we start counting microbes, it gets even more breathtaking as a single litre of seawater can contain more than a billion microbes and the microbes accounts for 90% of the total biomass in the ocean!
So, there is a job to do and a great opportunity to better understand how to ensure that our great ocean can be harvested in a sustainable way to the best of the entire population of the planet, and that includes the marine life itself, as there are many predators out there that belong to the food chain. Talking about predators and food chain, the humans are on the top and we should of course be the most concerned about our harvest and hunting habits.
In the October 2010 issue of National Geographic you can read about the disturbing consequences of fishing (and eating) top predators in the sea. One such top predator is the Atlantic bluefin tuna another is the Atlantic salmon. The blufin tuna is about to get extinct and it becomes obvious if you look at the price tag for each fish in market, they easily reach tens of thousands of dollars. The blufin tuna is slow to reproduce and is among the most energy demanding predators in the sea. If you eat 1 kg of a blufin tuna, it equals to 10kg of its intermediate predators like Pollock and herring and 100 kg of anchovies and lobsters and 1,000 kg of phytoplankton. This is really amazing and should be back of your head next time you go to the fishmonger. Ask for 1 kg herring or squid as it has a tenfold less impact on the species in the ocean.
Talking about buying and eating fish, one fisherman in Norway told us recently on the news that when he sent 1kg fish for preparation and packaging to China, he got 1.2 kg back. The reason is that the fish is being filled with water and Tri Sodium di Phosphate – that is E450 – how do you like that? Apparently the food authorities don’t care if you are being fed with phosphate – what about you?
We all should be more concerned about the link between the fish industry and the authorities, another example from Norway is the giant red King crabs (Kamchatka) that are now invading and clearing the sea floor along the cost from North to South and the fish industry is being imposed catch limitations to ensure the prices are kept high – what about the ocean environment and the diversity – down the drain, if you ask me!
In reality, and very much confirmed by the Census of the marine life, we don’t understand the consequences of wiping out huge amount of marine life as we still dont understand how vast the marine life really is. The most dense populated places in the ocean is the coral reefs, even here the scientists only have estimates that it is the home of between 600,000 and 9,5 million species, talking about big variations in estimates – and btw, there are deep sea coral reefs along the Norwegian cost line as well.
Make sure you eat the delicious and nutritious food from the ocean, but be a bit more cautious about what you eat. In 1949 Danish fishermen catches 5,500 tons of bluefin tuna, today they are extinct. And remember, it is all or nothing, that is, even the fish we don’t eat (at least most of us) needs to be protected, in the Mediterranean Sea, sharks have declined 99.99%!
Check out the ocean-film http://www.coml.org/oceans-film
Yet again I have had the opportunity to experience a close encounter of the fascinating gigantic manta rays in the Maldives, specifically at the Conrad Rangali resort on the Ari atoll. Two years ago, at exactly the same time of the year, I got to see the first one, now I encountered a giant of something like 5-6 meters wingspan (pictured by my dive buddy Nigel Hossack) – its nothing less than breathtaking – literarily as the encounter happens around 10 meters under water and only 1-2 m away from us. In general, experiencing the amazing marine diversity is in itself awarding. Nobody knows how vast this diversity really is, but the recently published Ocean Census is at least trying to record and find out, so are the scuba divers in the Maldives. Counting only those species being recorded with photos by scuba divers at the Maldives, we already have around thousand fish species, but of course, the reality is much higher, no wonder this marine diversity is important to the diversity of the whole globe, us included. 
