As a student enrolled in Oceanography at the moment, this was a great opportunity to learn more about coral reefs and biodiversity. An interesting point in the conversation was when a student challenged Professor Harvell about the massive death of sea stars in west coast as a result of unusual warm water.

A part of me wants to play devil advocate and wonder, species have always been evolving and/or dying out and mother nature seems to go through cycles of major extinctions. We have already gone through 5 of them (previous ones not being human induced), so is a 6 mass extinction really even avoidable? There is actually such a thing as “Intermediate Disturbance Hypothesis” which states that disturbance maximizes species diversity by periodically removing competitively dominant species and allowing less competitive species to reestablish themselves. So if this is indeed correct, perhaps species such as starfish need to be “periodically removed” for their growth to stay in check or help other species to thrive. This also leads me to question whether preventing a 6th mass extinction is really even possible. To be clear however, I do not condone the human induced polluting of the ocean and earth overall. I am just wondering if pollution has simply sped up a natural earth cycle?

Now tying this back to the film shown by Harvell, I think her argument for saving marine life is lacking. It seems like her argument is, marine life is pretty so we should save it. I’m sure her interest is deeper but it just came off that way to me. Overall though, interesting film.