Monday, January 15, 2007

Artficial Habitats- Effective or not?

Today in the newspaper there was an interesting article regarding work done by Marine biologist Glyn Sharp of B.I.O regarding the creation of artificial habitat for crustaceans to help battle their loss of habitat prompted by creation of wharfs, infilling, dredging and pipeline creation in coastal waters. They had intially hoped that this creation of artifial habitat made up of coral reef, would allow lobsters to have a new home. What they found however was that lobsters were not going to these areas, but still seemed to prefer rocky areas. This leads to the question of whether or not this means of sustainablility is effective or if it is a waste of time and resources is up for debate; however I personally believe that it is great that something is being done to help these organisms even if it possibly is only for monetary gains. Also as shown in the article even though lobsters did not go to these artificial habitat areas, other organisms did. This shows that by doing this it was not a complete waste as they learned some important information regarding other species.

1 comment:

CBEMN said...

I still think that prevention is better than remediation. We can't prevent everything and therefor this research remains invaluable. But it just shows how difficult and sometimes ineffective remediation is.
Cathy