If only the Commonwealth Games would go extinct instead of the sharks. Full links for both stories below.
SHARK WEAK, SCALLOPS WEAKER
from New York, Baltimore, Boston, Orange County (California), Manchester (UK) and likely more
For attracting attention, you could do worse than a report about how humans are driving sharks to extinction. Witness the media feeding frenzy that’s already swirling around a study coming out today in the prestigious journal Science. The latest news is that overfishing of sharks has indeed screwed up the food chain to the extent that scallops are being effected. (In a tragic twist of timing, the study by Ransom Myers comes out the same week the Dal biologist died, a major news story by itself as we saw yesterday, and the coverage continues.) The New York Times gives the shark study major play today in an article by Henry Fountain. Here are the lead paragraphs:
For years, conservationists have warned about overfishing of large sharks in the northwestern Atlantic, as the demand for meat and fins, coupled with slow growth and reproduction rates of many species, has caused sharp declines in populations of hammerheads, duskies and other sharks.
Researchers are now reporting repercussions beyond the declining shark populations. Depletion of large sharks, they write today in the journal Science, has led to the destruction of the bay scallop fishery along parts of the Eastern seaboard.
The study, by Ransom A. Myers of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and colleagues, is among the few to document the cascading effects that the loss of a top predator can have on a marine ecosystem. In the absence of large sharks, the researchers say, the smaller sharks, skates and rays that they feed upon have thrived. In turn, the study shows that as one of these middle links in the food chain, the cownose ray, has become more abundant, it has wiped out scallop beds in North Carolina. (full story here)
The Manchester Guardian also wrote its own story on the shark-scallop connection (here), and of course the Associated Press wire service put out a piece, which has been picked up by the Baltimore Sun, the Boston Globe and Orange County’s Register already. There will doubtless be more over the coming days. I’ll mention interesting or far-flung ones.
THE GAMES, THE GAMES
from cyberspace
The Commonwealth Games saga refuses to go away. Following the start of an inquiry in Halifax, the GamesBids.com site (which is devoted to, umm, the bids for major international games) reports:
On the first day of hearings on Halifax’s pullout from the 2014 Commonwealth Games bid, Duff Montgomerie, deputy minister of the Province of Nova Scotia’s Health Promotion and Protection Department, gave a general outline of events leading to the bid’s collapse.
He said consultant’s reports determined the bid’s business plan was too weak, reports CP.
Montgomerie told an all-party committee, “it became increasingly clear the funding gap was only one of the critical issues at hand. The reviews also identified fundamental risks such as uncertain revenue projections…an unprecedented 90 per cent investment of public funding, and insufficient contingency funding that would have left the province vulnerable in the event of cost over-runs”.
Halifax’s 2014 Commonwealth Games bid collapsed March 8 after provincial and municipals officials were concerned about costs that had escalated from $785 million to 1.7 billion. (full story here)
Meanwhile closer to home, this morning’s Herald has a front-page story about “Commonwealth Games boosters trying to resuscitate Halifax’s bid.” We’ll probably hear about it elsewhere tomorrow.
What’s more important than the Commonwealth Games? Send links here.
This article appears in Mar 29 – Apr 4, 2007.