I saw some people comment on a thread similar to this yesterday called, "Sailor says pacific is lifeless form Japan onwards for 3k Miles". I am guessing it is the same gentleman in this article and this is the full article. Some comments there were skeptical and suggested they had been at sea and hadn't caught anything or had not "seen any whales or dolphins". Let me say that there are countless counter arguments but try to view it from another angle. Lets say you are a developer and you do that most of your life day in and day out for years and years - just as this man sails the seas. After years you will have certain observations that will be a culmination of your experience and accumulated knowledge for doing that job for many years... And perhaps young developers will not understand it or will question how you came to such a conclusion, although it is evident to you and experienced peers like yourself. You can't put it into a white paper because of several reason's like time, money, and test conducting. This is like that, its experience and years of wisdom that are talking. Maybe a state will fund a study which will cost 10 million bucks and 5 years to do statistical fish and trash sampling to confirm it later on but without doing such things in the immediate term such a keen observation has and should have the weight and impact it deserves, by that I mean not being brushed off as there is not data and " I didn't see fish either", its deeper than that and the approach should be constructing rather than deconstructing.
I am in favor of environmental causes but you seem to discount at least one possibility. The person could be either exaggerating or outright lying. People love to exaggerate problems. The other day a user told me that a particular synchronization froze for over 45 minutes doing nothing right in the middle of it. I sent her the timestamped log file that showed there was no pause in the synchronization and that the entire process took less than 15 minutes. This type of thing is very common.
In addition to commonly exaggerating problems, some people lie to further an agenda. Maybe an employee thinks their nephew deserves a shot at developing the company website so they become hypercritical of everything you do. Or maybe a sailor with subjective memories just doesn't like what fishing boats are doing.
In any case, anecdotal reports should be taken as a call for further study, not as a call to draw conclusions.
Even an entire human lifetime is an eyeblink in the ebb and flow of the ocean environment. No matter what experience a person has, his own observations mean nothing, or rather, are insufficient to assign any causality other than natural variability. Most of the species that have ever lived in the oceans (or anywhere else on the planet) are now extinct, and this happened long before humans had any influence.
"his own observations mean nothing, or rather, are insufficient to assign any causality other than natural variability."
This would be an accurate statement, but the last hundred years have been particularly relevant as human activities have exponentially soared. You are hiding your head in the dirt if you think that our level of influence is insignificant over the course of a lifetime.
