Killing Aquatic life?

[thunsaker]

Maybe doing it a couple of times to see how many fish swim around is ok. If someone keeps on doing that thoughout the dive it would probably make me upset that they are killing a lot of urchins. I have to admit that I have killed some urchins on a couple of dives to see how many fish show up. This was many dives ago and I have not done this recently.

 

[Air On]

The simple solution is to send all them that you don't want on the west coast to the keys. We could use them to clean our reefs.

Clean your reefs? They EAT reefs and chew holes in them on top of wiping all living matter off of them. Hey, you want them you can have them...

You get President Obama to send me a paltry 2 million in stimulus money...
I'll organise many local divers to carefully hand collect live Urchins and deliver them to you. (We'll send some to the guy in Hawaii if he still wants them too)

We could actually make NEW JOBs and hire many divers, drivers, etc. to get them there. They are saying that green jobs are going to be what saves the economy (not holding my breath)

If they actually move forward with the seaweed (kelp) bio fuel process and start wanting to harvest the tops off of kelp off California... the Urchins are going to really need to be managed. They are already having a negative impact on the kelp forests.

When your finally over run with the Urchins, then we can start shipping them to Japan and Asia to help feed people there...

This could be a whole new green industry to kick off an old industry.

They already farm them all over the world...
National Sea Grant Office: News & Events-Farming Sea Urchins

We could rebuild the american fishing industry and increase exports...
Efforts underway to revitalize sea urchin industry

On the east coast... After the urchins destroy all the reefs and the lion fish destory all the fish, the only sea food you'll have left is Urchins.

I wonder if we mixed crushed post harvested urchin spines with calcium carbonate and some other thing is a sort of concrete if we could CAST shapes and build new reef structures?

I think if we took all the tires they are now removing that failed to make reefs (are we supprised nothing grew on the vulcanized rubber?) Then we coat them in this bio-crete and make soild mounts instead of just binding a wad of them with cables...

I know they have been experimenting with running current through metal structures to make them coat with calcuim carbonate to kick start new reefs... (By the way doesn't that release bubbles of O2 and Hydrogen we could be capturing as fuel?)

The new corals and sea plants are attracted to the Calcuim Corbonate.

I'm making jobs, feeding people, increasing exports, restoring the oceans, recycling, producing hydrogen fuel... Who knows the toxins in the urchins might help cure cancer while we're at it...

Anyone else want to help flesh this idea out?

 

[diverbob]

I dive, because I like to see how things react in their natural environment. I am a visitor in their home. I do my best to leave everything just they way I found it. I dont like watching people feed fish. If I wanted to see that, I would buy another aquarium. I dont like it when i am in the local quarries and people are feeding hot dogs to fish. The fish come to expect it, and then if you dont feed them, they start taking nibbles out of ears, and that hurts.

 

[J.R.]

Anyone else want to help flesh this idea out?

Was that a pun??

 

[AbyssalPlains]

It's not just divers. Just this past weekend I was diving off a boat off of Catalina Island and was disappointed to watch the crew toss the pieces of broken diving equipment overboard. Granted, it was only a small piece (the end of an inflator hose), but still. A tank had fallen over and the first stage was bruised. The captain was about to throw the bent yoke adapter overboard when I asked him if I could examine the thing. After he handed it to me, I slipped it into my bag where it stayed. A little later, I heard a loud bang, went outside and saw smoke billowing from the water. When I asked what happened, I was told the crew had thrown a firecracker at a school of fish trying to escape some predator close to the surface, and a sea gull had picked it up in midair. By sheer luck the gull dropped it, otherwise its head would have been shredded to pieces.

I thought to myself, "Gee, I thought we were in a marine reserve here."

But even if not, treating the ocean like **** doesn't make for good advertising in my opinion.

I'm kind of wondering whether I should go diving with them again.

 

[J.R.]

I'm kind of wondering whether I should go diving with them again.

"Kind of" wondering??? What part is confusing you?

 

[Thalassamania]

This question I pose to all divers from any certification to all levels of diving.
The use of killing Sea Urchins to attract other fish to feed seems to contradict all aspects in the dive community of not harming the environment.

Here, on the Big Island, spearheaded by CORAL, we are in the process of finalizing a set of voluntary standards that prohibits the practice.

Over the past week I have seen this very thing performed by a professional Instructor.

Gee ... he must have been from California!

My response was to say something to the owner operate/captain of the charter boat. The response from him was even more unbelievable. He states that this practice has been followed more often on the West coast when attracting fish for a closer look by divers. Is this right or wrong what is your impute?

Actually the Captain was correct. This was common practice in California for many years when urchin blooms were blamed for kelp die offs and urchins were seen as a pest that needed to be "controlled."

Dr. Wheeler J. North, of Cal Tech, was the expert. He worked on the complex ecosystem of the giant kelp (Macrocystis pyrifera) off the California coast. He determined that the kelp beds were shrinking as sewage fed the sea urchin population, which in turn fed on the kelp. He also studied the effect of humans on kelp, in particular the warm-water discharge from the San Onofre nuclear power plant, which deterred kelp development; and oil spills, an environment in which kelp thrive. He devised techniques for restoring and farming kelp forests. Wheeler was shown in National Geographic back in 1972 "Obliterating sea urchins with a hammer," a common practice at the time.

 

[AbyssalPlains]

"Kind of" wondering??? What part is confusing you?

Well, I don't want to be overly sensitive, either. I understand that folks who grow up on the coast and boats sometimes have a different attitude compared to people like me who consider themselves coral-huggers. Perhaps these things are a lot more common than I think on a lot of boats and I would end up not going diving anywhere. But it still rubs me the wrong way.

 

[calwolf]

Sometimes what we see underwater isn't the way it used to or "should" be. With the removal of top predators from many temperate marine ecosystems, their prey sometimes becomes super abundant, which can then over-graze their food source, in a "trophic cascade". One case is the hunting of sea otters, which eat urchins. There are, in most temperate coastal ecosystems, far fewer otters than 100 or 200 years ago. This has led to places where there are far more urchins than there used to be, which overgraze the kelp, creating "urchin barrens". In these places (note: not everywhere), I wouldn't feel bad about taking over the role of the top predator and removing urchins (helping to boost otter populations would be even better). Same argument with reintroduction of wolves in western North America, and lots of other critters. We've lost a lot of our top predators (in oceans and on land) in the last few hundred years, and some action probably should be taken to compensate for that.

 

[Thalassamania]

That was Wheeler's major premise.