All at Sea
All Aboard
Welcome to the blog series All at Sea!
The oceans are the last frontier on Earth. We know more about the surface of Mars. Yet our survival depends on one considerably more than the other. The oceans shape the global climate, fill the atmosphere with oxygen, and contain a bounty to feed entire civilizations. In short, they make this planet inhabitable. Indeed, ancient shallow seas almost certainly served as the crucible for life’s origin.
It fosters equal parts surprise and alarm then, to discover that much remains a mystery. Where did the water come from? How do species evolve beneath the waves? What lurks at the bottom? Here, we will set sail on a quest for answers, a great voyage that will take us from the inlets of Argyll to the coral reefs of Zanzibar, shedding light on humanity’s inseparable connection to water worlds. For this series at least, call me Ishmael.
Contents
1. Batten Down the Hatches
2. Making Hand Over Fist
3. Overhauling
4. Three Sheets to the Wind
5. Turning a Blind Eye
Batten Down the Hatches
A smooth sea never made a skillful sailor
~ Franklin D. Roosevelt
High and Dry
The vomit streams from my mouth like a fire hose onto the decaying wooden boards of the pier. As soon as the crab stick registered on my taste buds I knew I was in trouble. Undoubtedly the previous hour of funfair rides and blinding arcade lights did not help the situation. My senses were overloaded. In hindsight it was a perfect storm. But I was only 7 years old, and thus still found it difficult to successfully predict the consequences of my actions. But once bitten, twice shy – I have never eaten imitation seafood since.
This formative experience took place in Brighton, on the south coast of England. Just an hour’s drive from my childhood home, trips to the seaside were a staple of my youth. Despite the occasional mishap, I have extremely fond memories from those family vacations. Fossil hunting on the Jurassic coast, eating dinky donuts on the Worthing promenade, rock pooling in Lyme Regis. England has the best beaches; England has the worst beaches. Devoid of sand or sun for the most part, this is not the Caribbean. Picture more grey skies, the threat of rain, as people try to lay down beach towels onto the gravel without them being carried away in gale force winds. Also, the seagulls are unaccountably menacing. This is an England beach. Yet they have a charm beyond compare. And of course, if you are judicious, access to the most delicious, fresh seafood, straight off the dock. Prawns, cod, haddock, plaice, mussels. And to go with it some tartar, mushy peas, curry sauce. Our love of fish and chips is not unfounded. After all, England is a small island, you are never more than 70 miles from the coast. Seafood is the local delicacy. But this was something I took for granted as a kid. Clearly, I was eating fake crab. But I paid the price, and I learned my lesson.
Almost two decades later I emigrated to the United States to pursue my graduate education. I found myself in southwest Virginia, in the heart of the Appalachian Mountains. Stunningly beautiful – dense hardwood forests that stretched for miles, with endless peaks tinted blue in the morning mists. Paradise. But no saltwater in sight. You had to drive at least 5 hours before the Atlantic honed into view. It was only here that I realized what I had left behind. When you are surrounded by something you are blind to it. But then my eyes were opened. There are many who live far enough away from the ocean to where it doesn’t feature in their day-to-day existence. I was now one of those people, and it made me bereft. I didn’t know what I had until it was gone.
As I write, the seafood industry has a sustainability crisis. Overfishing and global change are threatening food supplies and livelihoods. In the not-too-distant future, it may not matter whether you live a stone’s throw from the coast or in the heart of a continent, the ocean’s coffers will run dry. One day, we will all lament our complacency, we will all long for what we once had.
Learning the Ropes
Physics has laws. Universal truths that all physical bodies obey. The law of gravitation is followed by grains of sand and galaxies alike. As a Zoology undergraduate at the University of Sheffield, I quickly learnt that things are not so simple in the biological world. There are no laws that all living things rigidly adhere to. Cat owners are well aware of this fact. There are no forces, no set of equations, that fully describe the menagerie of behaviors exhibited by Earth’s biodiversity. The best we can do in Biology, therefore, are rules. General truisms or conventions, patterns that are pervasive enough in nature to be notable, but far from universal.
The species-area relationship is one such rule, whereby larger areas tend to contain more species. This is a very intuitive idea, one that is borne out by common sense and personal observation. And yet, a million and one caveats and qualifications emerge that prevent this observed trend from being an immutable law. Different ecosystems of the same size – a desert and a tropical rainforest, say – can contain vastly unequal species’ richness. Species communities on islands are subject to atypical dispersal and colonization dynamics that prevent a direct comparison with continental landmasses. Someone counting beetles will come up with a different result from someone counting butterflies. And the list goes on. Even if you manage to avoid all these confounds, limiting your investigation to one group of organisms in one ecosystem on one continent, you will still find small areas with a surprisingly large number of species and large areas maddeningly empty. There are always exceptions to rules.
I first heard about the temperature-size rule whilst studying salamanders in the Appalachian Mountains of Virginia. Most of the salamanders live in the foothills and are no bigger than your pinky finger, but there are a few species that you can only find living at the tallest peaks, specially adapted to the harsher winters at higher elevations, and those salamanders are big, or at least as big as your thumb. The temperature-size rule describes how living things tend to grow differently when it’s hot versus when it’s cold. When it’s hot, individuals grow faster early in life, but mature at a younger age, such that they ultimately reach a smaller maximum size when fully grown. Over 80% of species studied have exhibited these patterns in growth, from seahorses to seaweed. And again, whilst some physical scientists may balk at 80% as a mere statistical aberration, in biology, four out of every five species following the same pattern is almost unheard of.
This ubiquity, however, generates a new problem, namely, why does this rule exist? Alternatively, why are such a menagerie of species affected by temperature in the exact same way? Some have proposed that temperature only impacts an organism’s growth indirectly through its impact on ecosystem productivity and hence food availability. However, the pattern persists in laboratory studies where food is controlled. This has led some to conclude that temperature directly impacts growth by influencing the rate of metabolic processes at the cellular level. The speed of the chemical reactions that take place within cells is intrinsically linked to temperature. At sub-optimal temperatures, cell division (i.e., growth) proceeds slowly.
The effects of temperature on growth and development, whilst well established in the lab, have never been formally tested on wild populations. I had originally planned to test these theories in Virginia, including predicting whether salamanders might shrink under climate change, but could never get the project funded. It was not until I moved to Wisconsin, to a fisheries department, that the ideas gained traction; unsurprisingly, there is a lot more money available to study the things that we eat. Testing the temperature size rule in Haddock or Herring, say, can be framed as an issue of food security or economics. Smaller fish = less meat = lower profit margins = lost livelihoods. My goal was to test whether these concerns were warranted.
In agriculture, environmental change is less at the forefront of people’s minds. For thousands of years, we have selectively bred crops and livestock to tailor them to our desires. And we can design climate-controlled barns and greenhouses to effectively isolate and buffer farm life from external conditions and the vagaries of weather. Through these efforts, dairy cows produce milk year-round, seedless fruit varieties abound, and meat animals are big. Commercial chickens are now so big they can barely walk. Our intentional influences on farmyard life easily overwhelm any of the marginal effects of global warming.
In fisheries however, we do not have the power to select genetic strains that attain larger body sizes to combat climate-induced shrinking. In fact, over centuries of exploitation, we have achieved the opposite. Fishing imposes higher mortality rates on adult fish. In evolutionary theory, this high mortality regime favors a ‘live fast die young’ life-history strategy. If there is a concern that you will not survive until next year, it is safer to mature earlier and pump out babies while you can. One consequence of this strategy is smaller average body sizes. For one, individuals are afforded less time to grow, and for two, energy is diverted from growth and allocated towards reproduction much sooner in the life cycle. Cod in the North Sea for example, now mature two years earlier than they did at the start of the 20th century, at half their former size. For populations already struggling to keep pace, continued warming could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.
I partnered with employees at the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, who have spent decades surveying fish in thousands of lakes across the state. This intensive monitoring provides the necessary data to track changes in growth across time and space in response to changing temperatures. Of the seven species we looked at, all but one showed the expected pattern of shorter lifespans and earlier maturity at warmer temperatures. For the one species that did not show any response to temperature, Northern Pike, Wisconsin represents the southern tip of its range. As such, every lake we had growth data from is close to the upper thermal limit for Pike, and therefore every population has low survival and early maturity – fringe populations are, by definition, at the limit.
At Loggerheads
Fish are rapidly adapting to the dual pressures of human harvest and warming waters. But evolution can only compensate for so much. Fish populations at the southern edge of their range are faced with two options - go extinct or move north. Fishers, in turn, face a similar dilemma. Once where fish were abundant and coastal towns supported entire communities of fisheries, the coffers have run dry.
Summer Flounder were once abundant in the Chesapeake Bay near Washington DC and represented the second most profitable fishery in Virginia. Now, however, they have largely disappeared from these waters due to rising temperatures that have shifted the species range northwards. A small contingent of Virginia trawlers now travel hundreds of miles up the coast to New Jersey to land their quotas. This, however, comes at great financial cost – diesel is not cheap. At a certain point, the enterprise becomes too expensive; in the last 20 years, many of Virginia’s Summer Flounder operations have folded.
The Summer Flounder fishery highlights the shortcomings of current management regulations for US fisheries. In the US, stock assessments for commercially targeted species are performed every five years. As a result, catch limits reflect past abundances and distributions. The quota for Virginia is still quite high, despite there no longer being any fish to catch. The quota for New Jersey is still quite low, causing ire amongst the local fishers that feel the regulations are now unnecessarily strict. Essentially, the wheels of big government turn too slowly to keep up. The degree to which people adhere to regulations depends on how much they trust them. If ruling bodies are slow to update regulations, people will start to ignore them. For species that are already struggling, a loosening of the grip of managing agencies is the last thing they need.
Walleye, a popular sportfish in the upper Midwestern United States, resembles the plight of the Summer Flounder. Populations in lakes at the southern edge of their range have seen dramatic declines. Given the modern ease of driving hundreds of miles for a weekend fishing trip, we are seeing the same phenomena of fishers chasing the remaining Walleye populations further and further north. The state department is gradually imposing stricter regulations, but the result seems to be increasing animosity from the public to local government. Fish populations continue to collapse.
Compounding the plight of Walleye is increasing competition with species adapted to warmer climates. Largemouth Bass, a warmwater species from the central United States, has itself been shifting poleward and encroaching on Walleye territory. Where it was once too cold for Largemouth Bass, they now thrive. Although the increasing overlap of Bass and Walleye is cause for concern, it presents an interesting alternative path for how humans might respond to climate change impacts on fisheries. Rather than chasing Walleye north, sport fishers may instead opt to stay local and fish for something else. I have shown in my work that this dynamic behavior might be the most effective way to curb Walleye declines; by reducing the fishing pressure on the struggling species, whilst also suppressing the population of the competitive species, the benefits are twofold. Given the proclivity for fishers to ignore strict regulations, a more prudent management strategy might be to encourage the public to diversify their target species. Only a small change in the behavior of the angling community can have a dramatic impact on the persistence of vulnerable species like Walleye.
Modern fishing regulations have been designed to limit harvest pressure to levels that species can compensate for. These regulations, however, do not account for environmental change. There is a need therefore, for agencies that manage fisheries to adapt. Current practices are far from new - setting lower harvest limits and banning certain types of nets in response to low fish abundances is documented from medieval Europe, as are instances of animosity toward authority for such regulations. However, in the theatre of climate change, these methods may be insufficient. Indeed, in the Middle Ages, the Baltic Sea’s Herring fishery, a fishery that had been operational for over four hundred years, unexpectedly collapsed at the onset of the Little Ice Age. Novel problems require novel solutions.
On the Horizon
To ensure commercial fisheries are sustainable industries we must accept their dynamic nature, as well as the dynamic nature of our planet, and focus our efforts on building resiliency to change. We are still in the early stages of understanding how fishing communities will respond to climate-induced changes in fish distribution and abundance. In contrast to the well-documented ecological impacts of climate change, we know very little about how people will react. But it is precisely how people react that will determine a fisheries’ fate. A change in the fish triggers a change in the fishers, which in turn will lead to further change in the fish, and so on. Only by understanding this feedback loop can we take steps to safeguard fisheries from extinction. And we must accept the ‘human’ element of fisheries in its entirety. It is human to defy authority. Particularly in the face of perceived unfairness or overreach, people are apt to scoff and skirt around the powers that be.
My journey in science - my quest to find inscrutable facts and concrete numbers - has led me to conclude that the way you sell an idea is often as important as the idea itself. For the sustainability of fisheries, public awareness may be just as impactful as tight, top-down regulations. After all, true sustainability can only be achieved if people alter their behavior willingly; if by force, then the system is only sustainable for as long as the regulating body maintains power. For many, changes don’t come easy, regardless of whether they come about through encouragement or force; old habits die hard. But the writing is on the wall. Something has to give. If not, then there is a distinct possibility that, someday, we will be left with nothing but imitation crab sticks on our dinner plates. Even the thought makes me sick.
Making Hand over Fist
Ah! how cheerfully we consign ourselves to perdition
~ Hermann Melville
Slush Fund
The gunshots ring out all around, thunderclaps ricochet off the canyon walls, making it impossible to tell from precisely which direction they come. Interspersing the explosions are periodic shouts and the dull thudding of hundreds of hooves galloping in the soft sandy soil. The stampede is reaching its destination.
The cowboys have spooked some wild horses, and are driving them southward, through the brush toward the awaiting corral. Here the Mesa narrows, forming a natural funnel, less than seven car lengths across, bordered on either side by sheer cliffs. On this table top mountain, the odds quickly swing in favor of the pursuers; only a handful of men can corner the entire herd and block their retreat. Suddenly the horizon in front of the lead horse opens up, the ground falls away. Pawing at the escarpment, sending rocks tumbling down into the canyon below, it senses the end of the road. They are trapped.
The cowboys peruse the spoils of their labor. They select the healthiest looking mustangs, rope them, and drag them away to be broken in. The rest of the herd is left on the mountain. With no water source at this altitude, and no sense of direction home, they will quickly perish.
Dead Horse Point, as it came to be known, is in the heart of the desert southwest of North America. Now, with the cowboy era well and truly behind us, this place is managed by the state department as an area of outstanding natural beauty. Often overshadowed by Utah’s National Parks, Arches, Bryce Canyon, Canyonlands, Capitol Reef, and Zion, the big five as they are colloquially known, Dead Horse Point is nonetheless one of the most stunning natural landscapes in the world.
I am here in the spring of 2025, doing a classic all-American road trip. I have spent several weeks travelling through Nevada, Arizona, Colorado, and of course Utah, to marvel at the geology, topography, and downright majesty of this arid world. Up until this point, I had never been to a desert before, and to be surrounded by vast empty expanses of nothing is something close to a spiritual experience.
Even flying in I got goosebumps. Descending towards Las Vegas international airport, the sight through the small porthole window is something to behold. It feels like you are about to land on Mars. And from this height, the true scale of the region is revealed. Parched earth, desolate ranges, barron peaks, as far as the eye can see, lifelessness stretching for hundreds of miles in every direction. But that is not to say there is nothing to see here. On the contrary, from the lookout at Dead Horse Point, my eyes are bombarded with colors and shapes in unimagined combinations, the likes of which I have never seen.
Setting my gaze in any direction, I am confronted with crags and bluffs, and ridges and palisades, buttes and tors. And each one is a work of art, a masterclass in the medium of color. Only Turner has ever come close to capturing the world as it presents itself before me, but even he cannot hold a candle; nature has the broadest palette. The rocks are streaked with shades of bronze and burgundy, of crimson, copper, carmine, and claret, of taupe and umber, of chestnut and mahogany. Seemingly random, irregular bands of a hodgepodge of hues, yet the vertical strata, the full composition, is flawless.
But there is one color missing: green. And it is here that you realize, it is the lack of green that tricks your mind into thinking you are not on earth. Images from the surfaces of other planets are, without exception, similarly devoid of greenness. Were one to ascend to the summit of Scafell Pike in northern England, whilst they would undoubtedly be filled with a sense of awe, they would never mistake what planet they were on. England is a green and pleasant land, and even at its highest peaks, grass carpets the ground. Green is the color of life. And it does not take a forest - a small patch of lichen, or smear of algal slime, is reassurance enough that you remain on the third satellite from the sun. But here, in the Utah wastes, there is naught, and the captivating beauty is tinged with an uneasiness that stems from the disquieting notion in the back of your mind that the place you are standing is, to all intents and purposes, inhospitable.
Walking around the mesa top, there are several lookout points where you can, squinting, trace the outline of a narrow canyon that snakes through the landscape below and stretches uninterrupted from horizon to horizon. Here, if you were able to descend and venture down to the canyon floor, you will find the secret of life.
Several hundred meters down, largely out of sight, flows the Colorado River, which for the last million years has been carving itself into a narrower and narrower channel, further and further out of view. Here, in the cool shade of the canyon walls, is the only place you will find green. Cottonwood, rabbitbrush, seepwillow, columbines, horsetails, all emanate from the banks. For what permits a patch of green slime or a hectare of forest are one and the same – water. The life-giving power of water is most evident in the desert. It takes its absence for one to fully appreciate its impact. I felt the same many years ago on the Nile. A cradle of civilization, a megalopolis built on its banks that has lasted 6000 years, but stray more than a few miles from the shoreline and you are met with sand, endless, incessant sand.
These mighty rivers exemplify tenacity, as they wind through the most uninviting landscapes on the planet without any hesitation. And through their bold, pioneering travels, they expand the frontier of life. This truly is the edge of the world.
Chock-a-Block aka Close Quarters aka No Room to Swing a Cat
On the way back to Las Vegas, I stopped at Lake Mead. Lake Mead is not a natural feature, and indeed it emerges in the desert as entirely out of place. In an alien landscape, it somehow manages to be the most incongruous feature. In 1931, as great desperation grew in the wake of the great depression, people began pouring thousands of tons of concrete into the Black Canyon of eastern Nevada. Their goal was to barricade the Colorado River. And with its path blocked, the water slowly began to rise, higher and higher up the canyon walls, until eventually it spilled over, flooding an area of desert more than 200 square miles. The erection of Hoover dam took five years. One hundred construction workers lost their lives. Clearly, someone thought this undertaking was worth considerable toil. Standing on top of Hoover dam, one is overcome with an appreciation for the power of water, and of the lengths humanity will go to harness that power, if even a fraction. Our economies hinge on the availability of water. Most utility bills, the manufacturing sector, food prices - the cost of everything is determined in large part by water. Americans in the 1930s knew this, and in damming the rivers sought prosperity amidst the dust bowls and destitution.
Fishing is a multi-billion dollar industry. Half of humanity relies on seafood - Abalone, Barramundi, Black Sea Bass, Bream, Cockles, Clams, Crab, Dab, Dorado, Eel, Flounder, Grayling, Huss, Haddock, and Hake, John Dory, Kippers, Langoustine, Lingcod, Lemon Sole, Mussels, Mullet, Octopus and Oysters, Pilchards, Prawns, Plaice, Red Snapper, Rockfish, Scallops and Skipjack, Squid and Skate, Trout, Turbot, Whelks, Whitebait, Yellowfin - we pilfer the oceans, the lakes, the rivers. We set lines baited with a thousand hooks, stretching for miles below the surface, we drag nets that could swallow cities, over every square inch of water. The resources we extract from the water prop up nations, literally. Yet there are even those that are not satisfied. Not satisfied with the bounty that the world’s oceans cough up, or not satisfied with the increasing costs required to recover it. Sturdy sea-faring vessels, hardy crew members, umpteen barrels of diesel; fishing isn’t cheap. If there was a way to domesticate and farm fish, then you could save a pretty penny. And indeed, yes, aquaculture, as fish farming is known, generates three quarters of the total net profits from global fishing. This is where the real money is made.
Farming can be traced back thousands of years, with the domestication of plants and animals occurring coincidentally in parts of the Middle East, China, and the Andes Mountains of Peru. In places where water was reliable enough, or could be manipulated for irrigation, people began cultivating wild species and selectively breeding those species over many generations to produce more desirable characteristics. These advances coincide with the establishment of civilizations. Farming allows you to generate a food surplus, a store for the winter. Prior to this, humans were forced to be largely nomadic for their survival. But as the Ice Age came to a close and the glaciers retreated, the agricultural revolution began, and villages sprang up. This was the dawn of humanity as we know it.
In contrast, fish farming is a relatively modern endeavor. For example, Bibury trout farm in the heart of the Cotswolds, proudly claims to be the oldest fish farm in England, yet it was only established in 1902, after the invention of the radio. Owing to its recency, we are still very much working out the kinks. Disease, for example, is rife in aquaculture facilities. Farmed fish are concentrated into unnaturally tiny areas, much like battery farming, to save on housing costs. Literally packed like sardines, transmission rates skyrocket. Bacterial infections, fungal pathogens and protozoan parasites are responsible for the death of millions. Disease prevalence on fish farms is particularly concerning when considering the often porous nature of aquaculture facilities. Fish farms are usually situated adjacent to natural habitats. It is much easier to build enclosures in situ that already have the appropriate water chemistry and features, than to be tasked with mimicking natural conditions from scratch. However, with this you run the risk of some farmed animals escaping and interacting with wild populations. Unfortunately, breakouts are commonplace. Not only will fugitives introduce novel diseases to the wild, they will also introduce undesirable genetic information. Domesticated animals are selected for captivity; they lack a lot of the fortitude to survive in the wild. Most farm animals are also extremely inbred. Any cross-mixing between wild and domestic animals therefore, is likely to compromise population health. When motivated by cutting costs and cutting corners, fish farming is a poisoned chalice. You cannot cheat nature. In the long run, our hubris will not go unpunished.
Below Board
Fish are farmed to boost production and make a quick buck. For modern humanity, nature often fails to provide enough supply to satisfy demand. Indeed, today we have become so efficient at plundering the earth’s resources, we must self-impose restrictions on what and how much we allow ourselves to harvest. Governments collaborate internationally to set fishing quotas, marine protected areas, and moratoriums for species on the brink of extinction. Hence, if you can farm it, you avoid so much in the way of rules and red tape. Many species however, do not find themselves amenable to captive propagation. Low survival in transit, habitat requirements that cannot be sufficiently replicated in an artificial setting, or simply being too big for the tank, can all result in a species effectively being ‘untamable’. In such instances, people can either obey the laws regarding wild populations, effectively reduce their efforts to comply, or try to fly under the radar.
Capitalism fosters a culture that rewards those who put profit above all else. Whether it be through desperation or greed, when there is money to be made, you can bet there is an illegal trade. In fisheries, this can take a variety of forms. Illicit activities can be as subtle as cooking the books; many fish that are legally allowed to be caught and sold are done so, but harvest levels exceed the legal quotas and landings are simply underreported. Modern fishing practices - long lines, trawlers, etc. - are so efficient and effective, it is almost impossible to not catch more than you are supposed to. If you exceed your catch quota, you are legally required to discard the surplus. Often this surplus is thrown back into the ocean dead, so even when the law is followed to the letter, it can present a problem, but it at least attempts to disincentivize excess. But of course, many fishers are reluctant to throw away good money, and attempts to smuggle the illicit cargo back to shore are rampant. Trawling also generates a vast amount of bycatch, non-target species that are often not legally tradable. One surprisingly successful trick to circumvent the regulators is to pass off bycatch as something you’re allowed to sell. When a fish is descaled, gutted, and fileted, it can be difficult to distinguish a sea bass from a sea bream. For fish that have differing regulations across their range, it can be particularly challenging; it is impossible to differentiate a cod captured in the Labrador Sea, for which there is a complete ban on cod fishing, from a cod captured in the North Sea, where some harvest is permissible. Such mislabelling of seafood flows from the ports all the way to the restaurant tables and supermarket aisles.
The materialism that stems from a capitalist society also fosters an infatuation with rarity. Demand, and therefore value, increases when something is rare. Gemstones, comic books, misprinted pennies, it doesn’t matter. If there are few in existence, there will be those willing to pay obscene amounts of money to be part of a small cadre of people in possession. It is elitism, but it is a very attractive elitism, because it is tied to some degree of permanence; the member’s circle can never expand, so to speak. Seafood delicacies like shark fin soup, caviar, and eel all fit this elitist paradigm. They are expensive, they are considered delicacies, because they are rare. The closer these species get to extinction, the more prized they will become. Selfishness and status chasing must be one of the most deplorable reasons for the loss of biodiversity. Perhaps an even more visible manifestation of this phenomenon comes from the exotic pet trade. When species get listed as endangered, and in theory afforded more protection by conservationists and environmental laws, demand from the pet trade skyrockets. The animal doesn’t need to be cute, or affectionate, or even easy to keep alive in captivity; if it is rare, people want one. Quack medicine is fueled by the same mindset. Powders and oils crafted from rare species, despite carrying no proven benefits, unfailingly fetch a high price. No one is clamoring for the ground up bones or pancreatic extracts of common species. Who ever heard of a pigeon or a house mouse curing cancer? Don;t be silly.
Ultimately, it is the perverse ideology of wanting to have more than you have, and importantly, more than what your neighbor has, that drives the machine forward. When, as a society, we champion competition and individual success, we should not be surprised when our modus operandi descends to what is in essence, an infantile game of one-upmanship. There is of course only one direction for the game to go. Harvest restrictions and conservation protections are enacted for rare species because there is a clear and present danger. When rarity bestows some kind of tantalizing allure, the problem is only exacerbated. We have driven the horses to the cliff. They peer over the ledge, and contemplate the fatal drop. Turning back they see us baying and salivating. In all directions there is oblivion.