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Callum Roberts (biologist)

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Callum Michael Roberts (born 1963) is a British marine conservation biologist, oceanographer, science communicator, and award-winning author. His 2007 book The Unnatural History of the Sea won the 2008 Rachel Carson Environment Book Award. His 2012 book Ocean of Life won the Mountbatten Maritime Award.

Quotes

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  • Surface current patterns were used to map dispersal routes of pelagic larvae from 18 coral reef sites in the Caribbean. The sites varied, both as sources and recipients of larvae, by an order of magnitude. It is likely that sites supplied copiously from “upstream” reef areas will be more resilient to recruitment overfishing, less susceptible to species loss, and less reliant on local management than places with little upstream reef. The mapping of connectivity patterns will enable the identification of beneficial management partnerships among nations and the design of networks of interdependent reserves.
  • More than two centuries have passed since Fanning's discovery. Palmyra passed from American to French, then to Hawaiian hands, but it was never colonized, perhaps because it was too remote even by Pacific standards. It was briefly a U.S. Naval air command base in World War II and the debris of conflict still liter the islands and lagoons. But underwater, it remains much as Fanning described it. Palmyra is one of the last places on this planet where shallow water marine life is still as varied, rich, and abundant as it was in the eighteenth century. A diver stepping into the seas around this atoll today is able to take a trip back in time to an age when fishing had not yet touched life in the sea.
  • ... when you take into account that third dimension of depth, then 97% of the volume of living space on Earth is made up by ocean.
  • Obviously, terrestrial mining does have very serious and significant impacts. But, largely speaking, they are much more controllable in a terrestrial setting. They are much more visible — so that third parties can verify them and make sure that mining companies are adhering to mining codes. Whereas, they would be far harder to see and verify and attribute to individual mines in the deep sea.

Quotes about Callum Roberts

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  • Roberts is a marine biologist and an occasional columnist for the Guardian. His command of research is prodigious, and his generosity with example is prodigal. He is good on the big picture, but he understands even better how to burnish an argument with gleaming detail. ...
    Roberts has a way of bringing marine disaster closer to home. The long summer vacation of British parliamentarians is not a reward for their legislative labours but a consequence of the Great Stink of 1858, in which a Thames choked with sewage and refuse became so vile that parliament's windows were hung with sheets soaked with bleach. ...
    He is good on the horrors of oil spills but he points out that the Gulf of Mexico's fishing fleets kill more marine life in a day than BP's notorious Deepwater Horizon disaster did in months. Oil companies are easy to demonise but the biggest source of oil pollution is either run off from land or directly injected by the two stroke engine of the recreational boat: the floating fuel and oils concentrate on the surface, poisoning the eggs and hungry larvae of hundreds of species.
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