There was high drama near Chennai’s Ennore Port when British LPG vessel BW Maple collided with Indian oil and chemical tanker MT Kancheepuram on January 28.It resulted in an oil spill that blackened the city’s coastline, leaving in its wake aquatic life gasping for breath and dying. The accident and the subsequent oil spill made headlines with extreme reactions from environmentalists and fisher folk even as the port management tried to come to terms with the man-made disaster. This kind of damage shows that the marine ecosystem is being systemically abused and degraded every day leading to all kinds of problems, the foremost being the depleting quantities of fish in the sea. The International Union for Conservation of Nature lists 368 marine species which are either endangered already or vulnerable of becoming endangered very soon. The list includes the Hawksbill Turtle, Hammerhead Shark, Blue Whale, Florida Manatee, Kemp’s Ridley Turtle and Fraser’s Dolphin. From an Indian standpoint, we are not faring too well either with many freshwaters and marine species being exploited senselessly. This is especially true of sharks and pelagic fish species in Indian waters. However, it may be a bit premature to conclude that some of the fish species are looking straight down the barrel of the extinction gun. Explains marine researcher Mayuresh Gangal, whose work revolves around fisheries, Compared to land, endemism in oceans, which are all connected, is quite low. For example, the Lion-tailed Macaque might be found only in certain parts of the Western Ghats, but lots of marine fish are found everywhere in the oceans. What occurs is economic and ecological extinction. In the case of economic extinction, a fish becomes so rare that it is economically not viable to catch it anymore. In ecological extinction, the species does not perform the role that it used to, in the ecosystem. Shark is a good example. It used to play the role of top predators by keeping numbers of small fish in check. But they have been fished out so much that they are no longer able to play the role in many places. Similarly, in some Caribbean islands, the grouper fish got so overfished that it no longer acts as a top predator. It could also amount to a tactical error when one views the marine system from the same lens as one does terrestrial systems, as in the case of the latter, every acre of land is owned and managed in some way. But the sea is deemed an open active resource where one can go anywhere and pull up as much as one can. It’s not treated like an area that needs to be conserved as much as it is a food provider…