Today's news was chock full of articles about a researcher in Canada and his colleagues in the UK and Germany who concluded the world's oceans would be fished out by 2048. What news! A little digging showed that the original article in the journal Science came out in August of 2005 - a year and a quarter ago. Why the wait until the world noticed?
It turns out that Drs. Boris Worm and Ransom Myers of Dalhousie University's Department of Biology got tired of nobody listening to their research on the loss of biodiversity in the world's oceans. They took matters into their own hands and made it easy for reporters to break the story. They prepared press releases and did most of the work for the reporters. The result was that the research was finally picked up by the Associated Press and syndicated widely.
Today, Google news reported 570 articles (!) telling the story.
It seems sad that researchers have to become experts on both science and marketing to get their message out, but there it is.
Interesting article. I am not sure though how these results can be quantified, as still much of the sea is undiscovered and new marine life is being found daily. I think 2048 is a little bit previous, but maybe there is some small print in there research that only relates to the 'common marine life',
ReplyDeleteI will ad this to my bookmarked list.
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