Open+Ocean+Conservation

Andrew P, Sasawat P,

There are many human impacts to the ocean. Both good and bad. There is probably more bad than good. A negative impact of humans on the ocean is that we exist, our very existence causes the problems below. The good thing is that we are trying to stop our impact on the enviroment by making MPAs or Marine Protected Areas that protect areas of ocean. This has little positive impact on the open ocean though since all we are apparently concerned about are the coral reefs. Another negative, once upon a time not so long ago //homo sapiens// decided that the ocean was infinite and dumped all their junk into it. This still happens today to, but it happens less than before, but then again, we still dump a LOT of waste into our oceans. Oil spills are a big problem in Ocean Conservation. Huge oil tankers carry hundreds of thousands of tonnes of oil, and when one sinks or crashes, all that oil is released into the ocean. Oil spills can take years to clean up. Ways to prevent oil spills are making ships have double hulls, if the outer hull is destroyed, the inner hull can still protect the oil from leaking out, or at least reduce the amount of spilled oil. If oil has already spilled, cleaning up can be done in many ways. One can burn the oil, vacuum it up, or Bioremediation or the use of microorganisms to consume the oil.

There are many endangered species in the open ocean. We'll start with the blue whale, the gentle giant in our facts page was hunted to near extinction, and even today, after decades of conservation (protection started in 1966), still are endangered. All we can really do to conserve the blue whale is to not kill them and wait. The next creature we will type about on this wonderful conservation page is the great hammerhead shark. The great hammerhead's dilemma was caused by overfishing, and illegal fishing. Overfishing is solved, but rules only exist to be broken. Another cause of the great hammerhead's demise is being caught in nets that weren't intended to catch them. We can design better nets to stop hammerheads from getting caught in them and better control illegal fishing.

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