A study of global fish populations has suggested fast-growth fish species are more vulnerable to population collapses than previously thought… “On the land, slow growing animals are at most risk of decline and we used to think the same was true in the oceans,” explained co-author Malin Pinsky from Rutgers University, US… Dr Pinsky and colleagues found that over the past six decades, fast-growing species that were commercially fished were three times more likely to experience a population collapse than their slow-growing cousins. He told BBC News that the team identified two main risk factors that made species particularly sensitive to overfishing… Dr Pinsky said that the findings suggested that management measures needed to pay closer attention to seasonal changes in the environment… “If you are fishing at a certain level and then the environmental conditions become poor and the fish population starts growing more slowly, it is very easy to drive that population to collapse,” he observed.
‘Next Pinatubo’ a Test of Geoengineering
Scientists who study ideas to engineer the climate to mitigate global warming say we should be ready to deploy an armada of instrumentation when Earth has its next major volcanic eruption. Data gathered in the high atmosphere would be invaluable in determining whether so-called “geoengineering” solutions had any merit at all… But Prof Alan Robock from Rutgers University said we had no real knowledge currently of how such a strategy would play out… “We’d like to be able to see how this sulphur dioxide cloud evolves from gas into particles and how the particles grow. If the particles are too big then they’ll fall out much more rapidly and you’d have to replenish them much more rapidly, if you’re interested in doing geoengineering. And so we’d like to understand the processes in the formation of these droplets,” he told BBC News.
