But "in some specific ocean areas, fishing gear makes up the vast majority of plastic rubbish, including over 85 percent of the rubbish on the seafloor on seamounts and ocean ridges," as well as in the Great Pacific gyre, a Greenpeace report said Wednesday. "(Ghost gear) is like a zombie in the water," Maack said..Known as "ghost gear", abandoned fishing objects make up a significant volume of plastic pollution in seas and oceans around the world and can trap large marine wildlife, causing them slow, painful deaths.They are estimated to account for 10 percent of the plastic waste in the oceans and seas globally, according to the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) and the Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO).

Far out in the South Atlantic Ocean, invisible to the South African coastline, diver Pascal Van Erp surfaced with an abandoned lobster cage covered in algae and other marine organisms. Images Wholesale Pneumatic Vacuum Cleaners showed a scattered array of fishing ropes and nets clinging to the 4,600-metre (15,000 foot) mountain, whose peak sits 26 metres below the surface.He pulled it up to the deck of the Arctic Sunrise, a Greenpeace vessel conducting research around Mount Vema, an underwater mountain located around 1,600 kilometres (almost 1,000 miles) northwest of Cape Town. "Nobody takes out the catch, but it's still catching.Plastic can take up to 600 years to break down, eventually disintegrating into harmful micro-particles that are ingested by fish and end up in people's food.An underwater drone revealed Mount Vema, where the Greenpeace mission operated, had not escaped such pollution.

"We are a thousand miles off the coast of South Africa and finding abandoned fishing gear here. "It's a huge problem because as they are initially set to trap and kill marine wildlife, they will do that for as long as they are in the oceans," Greenpeace Africa's campaigner Bukelwa Nzimande, 29, told AFP.From their underwater resting ground, discarded non-biodegradable materials continue to catch fish and crustaceans, and ensnare large mammals such as dolphins. is extremely disgusting," Greenpeace marine biologist and oceans expert Thilo Maack told AFP on board the ship.More than 300 endangered sea turtles were killed in a single incident last year after swimming into a was believed to be a discarded fishing net in southern Mexico. But only one percent of the world's oceans are covered by regional management bodies like SEAFO. Nets, lines, cages, crayfish traps and gillnets are either lost or intentionally dumped in the ocean at an estimated average rate of one tonne per minute.

Bottom fishing was banned on Mount Vema in 2007 by the Namibia-based South East Atlantic Fishing Organisation (SEAFO)." Such pollution kills and injures more than 100,000 whales, dolphins, seals and turtles annually, according to UK-based charity World Animal Protection.Researchers on the three-week expedition could not determine how long the abandoned gear had been sitting there -- but say it could have been there for more than a year given the state it was in.Ghost gear is like a zombie in the water; nobody takes out the catch, but it's still catching.Underneath the layer of the dark algae was a green hard plastic cage used to trap lobsters, with a small white pot attached to it. The United Nations estimates that 640,000 tonnes of fishing equipment is discarded around the oceans each year, the weight equivalent of 50,000 double-decker buses, said Greenpeace.

When the small fish grows up, the fishermen can really benefit. Marine Tools Already, about 90 percent of wild fisheries around the world are over-exploited or collapsed. Located in one of India's 11 ecologically critical coastline habitats, the area is teeming with life from more than 350 marine species including Indian Ocean dolphins and Oliver Ridley turtles.Meanwhile, the UNDP has also helped set up a crab farming project in the Sindudurg area to encourage local preservation of the mangroves and resistance to land developers and those gathering firewood from chopping the saltwater-tolerant trees down..But that bounty has suffered against the twin assaults of overfishing and pollution, which caused a steady decline local fish stocks and forced fishermen to push farther out to sea.But conservation efforts work best when they're linked with local livelihoods, Walter said.

Local officials are delighted with the low-fuss process and positive results.Now, nurseries for crab seedlings line up along a 2-acre (8,000-square-meter) stretch of backwater pools filled with the mud that crabs like to dig into. About one out of every 10 people in the world relies directly on the ocean to survive.It took years for the U.80 a pound). Since switching to new nets, fishermen say fish stocks are recovering, though there is no data collected yet to prove it."No one in 180 or so fishing villages of Sindhudurg district expected to have problems fishing, after centuries of their families relying on the sea. It takes up to nine months for the crabs to grow to full size, at which point they are harvested and sold for about per kilogram (. Most of those are among the world's poorest and most vulnerable, meaning they have few substitutes when marine life declines.And it is declining rapidly, thanks to increased fishing for an expanding global population and unchecked runoff of industrial chemicals, sewage and other pollutants. That action is even more urgent now that climate change is causing ocean temperatures to rise while waters also become more acidic, causing widespread destruction of coral reefs that sustain a quarter of all marine species.

Vasudevan, who heads a special unit dedicated to mangrove conservation for the government of India's western state of Maharashtra. "You cannot work on biodiversity or life underwater in isolation, without looking at the livelihoods of people, the bread and butter."This square net is a blessing for us," said John Gabriel Naronha, who runs six trawlers in the area.Recently, the group of nine women and one man earned nearly ,000 in profits from a single harvest. Surveys of fish population may be conducted at the end of this year, when the UNDP finishes its six-year project in the area. But two years after the new nets were fully adopted, fishermen insist they're making a difference. Colorful coral reefs span the shallows, while tangles of mangrove forests protect the land from water erosion. And the small fish gets a chance to grow.

"The project, launched in 2011, is one of many being showcased at a major conference on oceans beginning Monday at UN headquarters, where the United Nations will plead with nations to help halt a global assault on marine life and eystems that is threatening jobs, economies and even human lives.The fishermen were dubious when ocean experts suggested they could save their dwindling marine stocks just by switching to new nets.. Development Program to convince the fishing communities along India's tropical western coast that the diamond-mesh nets they were using were trapping baby fish, while a square-shaped mesh could allow small fish to escape to maintain a breeding population."The oceans of the planet are in dire need of urgent action," said says Marina Walter, deputy director for UNDP in India. we can get good prices for big fish."With very little manipulation of the environment, you can grow crabs wherever you have mangroves," said N.The struggles of India's fishermen are hardly unique.

Pneumatic Scaling Hammer Factory.Human ancestors were using stone tools to butcher animals such rhinoceros, horses and wild cattle as early as 250,000 years ago, according to a new study. “What this tells us about their lives and complex strategies for survival, such as the highly variable techniques for prey exploitation, as well as predator avoidance and protection of carcasses for food, significantly diverges from what we might expect from this extinct species,” Nowell added.NTOOL.The research led by April Nowell of the University of Victoria (UVic) in Canada shows surprisingly sophisticated adaptations by early humans living in a former oasis near Azraq in Jordan.

“The hominins in this region were clearly adaptable and capable of taking advantage of a wide range of available prey, from rhinoceros to ducks, in an extremely challenging environment,” she said. Researchers closely examined 7,000 of these tools, including scrapers, flakes, projectile points and hand axes (commonly known as the “Swiss Army knife” of the Palaeolithic period), with 44 subsequently selected as candidates for testing. The team excavated 10,000 stone tools over three years from what is now a desert in the northwest of Jordan, but was once a wetland that became increasingly arid habitat 250,000 years ago.

The team found the oldest evidence of protein residue, the residual remains of butchered animals including horse, rhinoceros, wild cattle and duck, on stone tools.5 million years, but now, for the first time, we have direct evidence of exploitation by our Stone Age ancestors of specific animals for subsistence,” said Nowell. Of this sample, 17 tools tested positive for protein residue, i. blood and other animal products.The discovery draws startling conclusions about how these early humans subsisted in a very demanding habitat, thousands of years before Homo Sapiens first evolved in Africa.“Researchers have known for decades about carnivorous behaviours by tool-making hominins dating back 2.