CONSERVATION

A common question I get asked is what even is marine biology. Do you study fish? Yes, I suppose in a way, but marine biology doesn’t just stop there. It’s an incredibly wide ranging subject, some biologists will study behaviour, some ecology and some look at the deep sea. However, the main question that people really want to know is, why should I care about the ocean? 
I grew up in a rural part of England, which depend largely on the agriculture in the area. We live just adjacent to the coastline, running out to the North Sea. But I still believe many in the area do not fully understand the benefit we gain from the sea, years after our large fishing trade in the port of Kings Lynn has diminished.  
Something to remember is that everything on this planet is linked together in a cycle. Everything on this planet interacts together forming an ‘ecosystem’, which links non-living and living components together. For example we need air to breath which nicely enough is created for free by processes such as photosynthesis. We regularly think of photosynthesis as the process that trees use to draw in Carbon Dioxide and Water from the environment and spurting out nice fresh Oxygen for us to breath. But it isn’t just Trees that use this mechanism. In fact 50% of oxygen we reap from photosynthesis comes from single celled plants that live in the ocean, called phytoplankton. 
Not only does phytoplankton support our lives, but it is also the basis of ocean food chains, it is the equivalent to our grass as a primary producer which feeds all the way to the quaternary consumers such as Birds of Prey. So it’s pretty versatile for just a single cell! 
Phytoplankton however just scraps the surface of what the ocean can offer us, of course we can also reap food from the ocean such as fish. However unfortunately humans are decreasing fish stocks at an increasing rate. But that’s for another article…
The less obvious uses of the ocean are its pharmaceutical and medicinal sources. Animals such as the Tunicates for example are interesting to us as they have the ability to concentrate and store trace elements from seawater. Furthermore they can produce biologically active chemical compounds that have the potential use as antiviral or anti-cancer drugs. Now imagine that we have found these abilities in plants and animals that we know about. Now cast your imagination to all of the plants and animals that we don’t know about with the knowledge that we have only explored an estimated 15% of the ocean. (That’s far less than how much we have explored of Mars - FYI.) Then remember that there are organisms living in the harshest extremities of life, some living in volcanoes and hydrothermal vents. If they have the abilities to withstand these environments, imagine the transferable knowledge we could attain. There is a lot of life to be discovered, now our job is to continue the quest for life and preserve it.