Preserving 4 Percent of the Ocean

RESOURCES:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/08/110829115431.htm


There are 129 species of mammals in the world and one fourth of them are at risk of extinction. This is very concerning because you need all the species in order for the ocean's ecosystem to work properly, they all rely on each other. To decide where they should conserve the marine life, researchers overlapped maps of the marine life and picked the areas with the most biodiversity. Studies showed that there were only twenty areas in the whole world with the largest amount of species. If we preserve just nine of the twenty areas we would save eighty four percent of all marine mammals, 108 in all. These sites make up only four percent of the worlds ocean including Baja California, eastern Canada, Peru, Argentina, northwestern Africa, South Africa, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand. Other factors also played a role in the nine areas such as pollution, local climate disruption, and commercial shipping. About seventy percent of the areas show effects with high human impacts. If we don't do something now, the generations to come are going to do even more damage. What was also interesting is that the other eleven areas include species that can't be found anywhere else. That's why we need to preserve the sites now, not later. I wonder if one day our Earth will be a healthy planet again, or will it be so sick that no species would be able to survive, not even humans?