European Union Can't Blow Opportunity to Set Strong Marine Litter Targets

Seas at Risk
Marking 'International Bag-Free Day,' more than 30 non-governmental organizations (NGO) are making a final call to EU Environment ministers ahead of the July 15 deadline for setting marine litter targets, as required under EU law. In an open letter sent to all 27 ministers, the NGOs are calling for ambitious and significant reduction targets for 2020.
Under the Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD), member states have to disclose their initial assessments of their own waters, define what they consider to be ‘Good Environmental Status’ and set targets for several marine environmental challenges, including marine litter, for 2020.
Monica Verbeek, executive director of Seas At Risk said:
“The MSFD presents a golden opportunity for member states to tackle the problem of marine litter and plastic pollution in our seas. We want to see member states committing to targets that will have a real and noticeable effect on litter levels on our beaches and in our seas, not only for the sake of marine life, but also to reduce the economic burden marine litter brings to coastal communities and maritime industries. Significant reductions are possible but strong political will is needed now.”
The 32 NGOs—whose interests range from turtle conservation to waste reduction policy—fear that member states could end up wasting the opportunity by setting weak targets that if achieved will have little effect on the state of the marine environment.
The letter—and an associated advice document for the Environment ministers that was published earlier this year—details the feasibility of setting a 50 percent reduction target in marine litter by 2020.
The letter is being sent out individually to all European Environment Ministers on July 3 to mark ‘International Bag-Free Day.' This year, groups from all over the world are organizing activities to raise awareness on the impact of single-use plastic bags on the environment.
- The letter can be read in full by clicking here.
- For more information on International Bag-Free Day, click here.
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By Aaron W Hunter
A chance discovery of a beautifully preserved fossil in the desert landscape of Morocco has solved one of the great mysteries of biology and paleontology: how starfish evolved their arms.
The Pompeii of palaeontology. Aaron Hunter, Author provided
<h2></h2><p>Although starfish might appear very robust animals, they are typically made up of lots of hard parts attached by ligaments and soft tissue which, upon death, quickly degrade. This means we rely on places like the Fezouata formations to provide snapshots of their evolution.</p><p>The starfish fossil record is patchy, especially at the critical time when many of these animal groups first appeared. Sorting out how each of the various types of ancient starfish relate to each other is like putting a puzzle together when many of the parts are missing.</p><h2>The Oldest Starfish</h2><p><em><a href="https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/216101v1.full.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Cantabrigiaster</a></em> is the most primitive starfish-like animal to be discovered in the fossil record. It was discovered in 2003, but it has taken over 17 years to work out its true significance.</p><p>What makes <em>Cantabrigiaster</em> unique is that it lacks almost all the characteristics we find in brittle stars and starfish.</p><p>Starfish and brittle stars belong to the family Asterozoa. Their ancestors, the Somasteroids were especially fragile - before <em>Cantabrigiaster</em> we only had a handful of specimens. The celebrated Moroccan paleontologist Mohamed <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.palaeo.2016.06.041" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Ben Moula</a> and his local team was instrumental in discovering <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0031018216302334?via%3Dihub" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">these amazing fossils</a> near the town of Zagora, in Morocco.</p><h2>The Breakthrough</h2><p>Our breakthrough moment came when I compared the arms of <em>Cantabrigiaster</em> with those of modern sea lilles, filter feeders with long feathery arms that tend to be attached to the sea floor by a stem or stalk.</p><p>The striking similarity between these modern filter feeders and the ancient starfish led our team from the University of Cambridge and Harvard University to create a new analysis. We applied a biological model to the features of all the current early Asterozoa fossils in existence, along with a sample of their closest relatives.</p>Cantabrigiaster is the most primitive starfish-like animal to be discovered in the fossil record. Aaron Hunter, Author provided
<p>Our results demonstrate <em>Cantabrigiaster</em> is the most primitive of all the Asterozoa, and most likely evolved from ancient animals called crinoids that lived 250 million years before dinosaurs. The five arms of starfish are a relic left over from these ancestors. In the case of <em>Cantabrigiaster</em>, and its starfish descendants, it evolved by flipping upside-down so its arms are face down on the sediment to feed.</p><p>Although we sampled a relatively small numbers of those ancestors, one of the unexpected outcomes was it provided an idea of how they could be related to each other. Paleontologists studying echinoderms are often lost in detail as all the different groups are so radically different from each other, so it is hard to tell which evolved first.</p>President Joe Biden officially took office Wednesday, and immediately set to work reversing some of former President Donald Trump's environmental policies.
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