Den satten industrialisierten Volkswirtschaften gehen schleichend die Menschen aus, die Anzahl der Geburten pro Jahr sinkt unter die Anzahl der Verstorbenen. Hat das vielleicht hat es mit einer Abnahme der durchschnittlichen Intelligenz zu tun?
Eine Studie an Moskitofischen (Gambusia holbrooki) zeigt, dass kluge Männchen bessere Chancen haben, ein Weibchen anzulocken und zu begatten. Intelligenz wirkt offenbar nicht nur indirekt als Selektion, also dadurch, dass intelligentere Individuen rascher und mehr Futter finden und damit auch Vorteile bei der Paarung haben. Die Autoren der Studie vermuten eine direkte Wirkung: «Ein besseres Gehirn könnte einem Tier helfen, mehr Partner zu finden, mehr Sex zu haben und schliesslich mehr Babies zu bekommen.» Tests ergaben, «dass sich intelligentere Männchen mit mehr Weibchen paarten und mehr Nachkommen zeugten als weniger gescheite Fische».
Also, Männer: trainiert euer Gehirn, nicht nur eure Fitness!
Screenshot from MSC’s website: the promised benefit may work for the owner of the trawler, but for the workers? Let alone artisanal fishermen…
In an open letter, the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) was recently accused of enabling labour rights violations in its certified fisheries.
The authors of the letter [1] are members of the Seafood Working Group (SWG), a global coalition of human rights, labour, and environmental organisations, including Global Labor Justice (GLJ), a Washington-based NGO. The letter criticises ’systematic exploitation and hazardous conditions‘ and calls for ‚urgent reform of MCS’s social policies and certification processes‘.
In its response, MSC rejected these ‚misleading claims‘, arguing that the MSC ecolabel had never made any social claims. However, in the same communiqué, MSC states that certified fisheries ‚must describe measures in place to prevent forced labour, and any fishery convicted of this, (is) excluded from being part of the MSC programme‘. MSC invites cooperation in order to combat the systemic and global problem in fisheries. [2]
In other words, the critics were right. But it is also true that with perhaps 25% of the global catch, MSC alone will solve at best a quarter of the problem. However, the integration of social responsibility into a leading certification system will set a crucial standard for civil society, politicians and buyers, who decide on the rules for the majority of non-certified fisheries.
The idea that a fisheries certification system should focus exclusively on environmental issues and ignore labour conditions, which are an integral part of fishing practices, may have been understandable 25 years ago when MSC was launched; today it sounds outdated.
PS: And soon it will become unthinkable to certify a fishery that does not do everything it can to minimise animal suffering.
Whales filter seawater to feed on krill, tiny zooplanktonic crustaceans. When the whales were decimated, it was assumed that the krill population would flourish, but in contrast, their population declined at the same time. A recent study by the University of Washington [1] found that whale excrement contains a significant amount of iron and non-toxic copper, both essential but scarce nutrients for phytoplankton, which in turn is the food source of krill. In other words, whales have always provided the basis for their own prey and that of many other marine animals. The critical role that whales play in the complex marine food web was jeopardised by industrial whaling.
On other places in space, there could also be life in the oceans, but it would not be easy to detect . A study at the University of Reading [2] suggests that the physics of alien oceans could prevent deep-sea life from reaching the surface for us to see. In the case of a moon of Saturn, its ocean forms layers that are so distinct that they slow the upward movement of material from the seabed. The absence of tangible biological signatures on the surface does not therefore mean that there is no life in an alien deep sea. Whether this is good news for billionaires exploring extraterrestrial havens is another question; for those who remain on Earth and depend on healthy oceans, the international ban on whaling is a glimmer of hope and should be defended against the greed of some nations.
PS: In Humpback whale songs, researches recently detected ‚the same statistical structure as human language‘. The assumption that language ability is reserved for Homo sapiens is obviously anthropocentric, professor Chomsky.
Title picture: A Whale shark (Rhincodon typus) filter-feeding plankton at night (credit: Arturo de Frias Marques / Wikimedia Commons)
References:
[1] ‚Whale poop contains iron that may have helped fertilize past oceans‘, ScienceDaily, 06.02.2025
