ABSTRACT
Out of sight, out of mind. Nowhere does the saying seem more appropriate than in the way we treat underwater life. Our scientific understanding of aquatic biodiversity lags far behind our knowledge of terrestrial life. Naturally, we're quicker to understand the potential for commercial exploitation than we are to decipher and deal with threats to aquatic biodiversity. Food fish aquaculture, which barely existed three decades ago, has since emerged as the fastest growing food industry. Along the ocean floor, the modern equivalent of the gold prospector is the pharmaceutical company researcher, sifting through samples of sponges, ascidians and other bottom-dwelling organisms in the hope of finding cures for cancer and other diseases. As in the plant world, advances in genetics signal that we've barely scratched the surface in our quest for new (and often controversial) uses for aquatic life, whether plugging a flounder gene into a strawberry to increase its resistance to frost or finding a way to use deep sea microorganisms to gobble up oil spills.
