Wildlife benefits from many of the objects abandoned by humans. Old mines provide homes for Ringtail troops, and an old sofa serves as a packrat palace. We’ve taken away so much of the natural habitat that animals need, it is ironic that cleaning up after ourselves can cause further harm.
Originally posted on strange behaviors:
(Photo: Reinhard Dirscherl/ullstein bild via Getty Images)
A few years ago in the Black Sea, off the Turkish coast, a marine archeology expedition discovered a 2,400-year-old wooden shipwreck. It was still in good condition because of low-oxygen levels at its resting depth, and a video revealed human bones and vase-like clay storage vessels, called amphora, still intact. But when the crew returned to investigate the following year, fishing nets dragged across the bottom had reduced the entire wreck to scattered rubble. It was, said one archaeologist, like somebody drove a bulldozer through a museum.
The same thing has happened to roughly 45 percent of the estimated 3 million shipwrecks in the world’s lakes and oceans because of the industrial-scale trawling that has also decimated fish stocks worldwide.
But in a new study being published in the journal Marine Policy, an archaeologist and an ecologist propose a solution they say…
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