Word: ecosystems
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...cost, in terms of convenience to today's undergraduates, is awfully steep. We cannot mince words: cockroaches are loathsome. There is very little more revolting than watching cockroaches scurry through one's room in the middle of the night. And the species native to the Harvard ecosystem grows to a truly disgusting length of an inch to an inch-and-a-half, no pretty sight in the bathroom before breakfast...
...defend scores of stilt houses across the state, from Biscayne Bay to the Everglades and the Gulf Coast. Environmentalists want the state and federal governments to raze the structures, many of which are on public land, because they regard them as a messy human intrusion on Florida's delicate ecosystem...
That's not just academic information. For as the seals and other marine mammals go, so goes the whole Bering Sea ecosystem. Spanning the oceanic divide between the U.S. and Russia, it is one of the richest and most commercially productive marine environments on earth, teeming with pollack and halibut, fur seals and Steller's sea lions, horn puffins and murres. The seals and seabirds depend on catching fish, and so do humans. More than 2,000 boats from the U.S., Russia, Japan, Norway, China, Poland and the Koreas haul in an annual catch worth roughly $1 billion. The portion...
...surface, that business is healthy: the pollack catch has stayed near record levels. But signs of overfishing and an ailing ecosystem can be seen higher up in the food chain. The fur-seal population has not increased despite a longstanding ban on commercial hunting. The number of Steller's sea lions, which feed mostly on pollack, has plunged 80% since the 1970s, and seabirds such as the red-legged kittiwake are also in trouble...
...population is so depleted that cod fishing has been banned in much of the area until the species recovers. In the still vibrant waters between Alaska and Siberia, humanity has another chance--perhaps the last chance--to prove it can take care of a crucial marine ecosystem...