Carlos Duarte, Director at the Oceans Institute at University of Western Australia highlights the threat to dwindling global fish stocks:
These are real problems, as more than three-quarters of the ocean’s fish stocks have been depleted, sometimes beyond recovery, and, particularly, the global tuna fishery can be better portrayed as war on tuna than as a fishery.
But he points out that current levels of plastic pollution in the Pacific are a result of the 2011 tsunami and will start clearing in 2014.
Soon after the tsunami of March 2011 that triggered the Fukushima accident, NOAA published models that predicted how the huge patch of debris washed to the ocean by the power of the retreating waves would take three years to travel across the ocean to strand, sometime in March 2014, along the beaches of California, Oregon and Washington in the USA.
And that jellyfish blooms, algae blooms and coral bleaching are natural cycles and not a threat to the ecosystem.
Read more at Is the ocean broken?.
I tend to disagree that jellyfish blooms are part of the natural cycle. From experience here in North Queensland and also Japan and Europe, it’s the decline in fish stocks which is responsible for the increase in jellyfish.