The jellyfish : fisheries link

Abstract

Public interest in the oceans started in earnest in the 1970s, propelled by Rachel Carson's epic The Sea Around Us and Jacques Cousteau's evocative films. But over the past few months there has been a deluge of information about marine living resources. Sifting through this information might seem a daunting feat for most people. So today I will attempt to review and summarise some of the main issues of interest. There is an adage in the accounting profession that 'what gets measured, gets managed'. This in turn has spurred some epic census feats, most notably the recently completed Census of Marine Life, a mammoth effort spanning over 10 years, involving thousands of experts from over 80 countries commissioned in 17 different regional projects, and who rallied around the painstaking logging of marine biodiversity.