it's the food chain, stupid.

from today's washington post:

Overfishing of powerful sharks--a top predator in the ocean--may endanger bay scallops, a gourmet delicacy.

With fewer sharks to devour them, skates and rays have increased sharply along the East Coast and they are gobbling up shellfish, particularly bay scallops, researchers report in Friday's issue of the journal Science.

Ecologists have known that reducing key species on land can affect an entire ecosystem, but this study provides hard data for the same thing in the ocean, said lead author Charles H. Peterson of the Institute of Marine Sciences at the University of North Carolina. . . .

"We were able to show why these top predators matter," Peterson said. "We knew the answer right there, that there was a consequence."

[insert sound of head banging on cheap formica desktop]

i'm sorry, i'm currently suffering a pamela-isley-esque fit of antihuman rage and would like to wash the majority of folks right out of the planet's hair and repopulate the world with vines and reeds. i know that isn't nice, but sometimes i simply can not control my despair. did someone think the sharks didn't matter? did some ecologist somewhere think that the ocean was immune to the laws governing the rest of the natural world? is no common sense being exercised by anyone anywhere at all? why do we have to work so hard to convince people that there are consequences? WHY DOES NO ONE CARE ABOUT THE CONSEQUENCES UNTIL THEY CUT INTO THE SUPPLY OF FRESH SHELLFISH???

despair, i say, and i'm going home to tend to my lilies. enjoy your scallops while they last, fools, and please, please, do not decide the solution is to take out the skates and rays. or do, i don't care; maybe it will be the thing that finally puts the plants in the lead.