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The Ocean is Alive
Humans and other creatures that live in the same area maintain a very close, interrelated balance with each other. The ocean is part of this balance, and it is easily affected by any changes. When people catch too many fish, this balance is destroyed, and it damages the ocean's health. Off the coast of Central America is the Caribbean Sea, which has beautiful coral beds on the sea floor. However, shop owners who sell souvenirs there caught too many of a certain kind of fish for tourists. The result was a huge increase of sea urchins in the area, because the fish that used to eat the sea urchins were gone. Sea urchins eat the algae that protect the corals! The corals in the area were destroyed after an uncontrolled number of sea urchins ate all the algae that could be found. As a result, divers and tourists started going to other places to see beautiful corals, and local people's income decreased. The souvenir shops might have made a lot of money from selling the fish at first, but ended up having to close down. Because they caught as many fish as they wanted just for their profits and without thinking about the future, it came back to haunt them. The same can be said about trawler fishing. Trawler boats pull big nets with chains that scrape everything from the bottom of the sea. By doing this, fishermen can catch a lot of fish at once. But trawlers dig up mud, rocks and sand, and destroy the precious homes where fish eggs are spawned and tiny fish grow. As fishermen use more and more trawlers, the number of fish will decrease, and soon there won't be any fish to catch at all. Also, trawlers catch various kinds of fish. Some fish are bycatches, which are incidentally caught with the targeted species. They sometimes include even turtles and dolphins. A large number of fish are thrown back to the sea after being caught, and most of them die. It amounts to 20 million tons a year--the same as a quarter of the world's fish catches. We need a method of catching fish that doesn't destroy so much other sea life. An increasing number of countries use specially designed nets that turtles cannot get into. In Japan, trawling is being banned in some communities, and some people are trying to reduce the number of trawlers used. Even so, fishermen still use trawlers to catch shrimp. Why? Well, it's because there are many people who buy shrimp. In Japan, an average person eats as much as three kilograms of shrimp a year, as Japan is the world's top "shrimp consumer." So, we have to think not only about how we catch fish, but also about our diet.
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   1. Water on our planet
   
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