Gilbert Rowe

The Biodiversity Crisis and the Gulf of Mexico

By Gilbert T. Rowe
Prof. and Head, Marine Biology Dept., Texas A&M at Galveston

     The accelerated loss of species from a broad spectrum of habitats world-wide is thought to be reaching a critical state by taxonomists.  The crisis is exacerbated by a steady decline in support for taxonomic studies in sometimes remote locations where large proportions of the species still remain undescribed.  The causes for the crisis include loss of habitat (trawling, loss of wetlands, diminished freshwater, eutrophication, hypoxia, etc.), over-fishing (and including inadvertent loss to by-catch), and invasive species (displacing natural populations).
     In the Gulf of Mexico intense competition between renewable living resources (the source of biodiversity) and other valuable assets (oil and gas, tourism, commercial fishing, urban and industrial development, etc.) is unique in both the issues of concern and how the problems have been dealt with, in a regulatory sense, in the past.  Conundrums are particularly evident in the vast offshore oil and gas deposits that are the target of new exploration and production.  Not only do these untapped resources hold great promise for new energy supplies, but they also support remarkable communities consisting of cooperative partnerships (symbiosis) between specialized bacteria and large invertebrates.  In the coastal zone, choices have to be made between the protein and resultant income accrued from mariculture and the effects of potential eutrophication that can accompany such systems.
     Solutions to the crisis are not always apparent and rarely easy to accomplish.  Support for taxonomic studies needs to be increased.  Partnerships between industry, academia and government need to encouraged.  Urban and industrial development needs to be based on long-term cost-benefit analysis that includes loss of biodiversity.  The latter suggests that economic value can be attributed to levels of biodiversity and species gain or loss, which of course is equivocal at best, at this time at least.  Fisheries management needs to be science based, rather than political.  If knowledge is inadequate to set limits or quotas, then funding for ecosystem-level fisheries research needs to be enhanced.  These problems in the Gulf of Mexico are not trivial and resolving them will not be easy.