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How Seafood / Food Chain Consumption Affects Biodiversity And Fish Population Numbers


How and Why to Eat Local Seafood by Margot Wilsterman
Kate Masury January 7, 2019


Description: I team up with my classmates at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth School for Marine Science and Technology to talk about how consumers buy seafood. I also chat with Kate Masury at Eating With the Ecosystem to discuss seafood purchasing, and how we can use our power as consumers to eat more fish more sustainably.

There are still some restaurants serving Sharkfins soup in HK, Indonesia, Singapore etc... Shark fins soup should be banned. Protect the sharks ecosystem. 


Read up more on how our daily eating/ consumption habits with seafood, being local fresh production or fish farming etc... leads to the massive decrease in fishes population, especially if one loves eating sushi/ sashimi, we are also one of the guilty ones too! ~ However, we can choose to eat the more common seafood in market, rather than the rare species like the Blue Fin Tune for instance. Or better still, reduce the daily consumption of sushi/sashimi and opt for better alternatives like eating vegan and also eat less red meat and dairy products. 

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On November 29, 2018 I had the pleasure of listening to two graduate students talk about their studies at the University of Rhode Island’s Graduate School of Oceanography. Both women helped fill a complete picture of what is going on in the Narragansett Bay in regards to the food chain and climate change. 

Nicole Flecchia delivered the first presentation. Her studies focus on small-scale food webs. She looks directly at the primary producers (organisms such as phytoplankton that make their own food) and consumers. Her presentation concentrated on the chain of nutrients to phytoplankton and then to zooplankton. Flecchia started her presentation talking about the amount of nitrogen in the bay, a key nutrient needed to feed phytoplankton. Phytoplankton, like their terrestrial plant relatives, require nutrients such as nitrogen to grow. The phytoplankton are then consumed by zooplankton (the animal constituent of plankton, which consists mainly of small crustaceans and fish larvae). 

This is a key step in the food chain, as zooplankton are an important food source for many Narragansett Bay fish. Additionally, many of the zooplankton that are not eaten then grow up to become some of our favorite seafood species. Flecchia noted that while nutrients such as nitrogen in the bay are important, when there are too many nutrients in the bay it can lead to fish kills like the one from 2003. 

To understand the chain in a simple way, more nutrients leads to larger phytoplankton blooms. When the phytoplankton die they begin to decompose, a process that uses oxygen. When the bloom is big enough, it can use too much oxygen, killing the fish left in the oxygen depleted waters. 

https://www.eatingwiththeecosystem.org/blog/

#FoodChainAndClimateChangeAwareness #Narragansett Bay #HowAndWhyToEatLocalSeafood #DineWithDivers #Hungry#EcoMarineWildlifeConservation #Travelgowhere #Scubareefing#HowFoodChainConsumptionAffectsBiodiversityAndFishPopulationNumbers


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