Marine life emergencies harm the ocean ecosystems and marine species that depend upon them. They may have different aggravating factors, such as increases in ultraviolet B radiation, temperature extremes, duress of many kinds, or that individuals are much more weakened by the increasing concentration of chemical contaminants in their tissues or their diet.

The prime need now is to determine both proximate and more distal causes so that we can more effectively prevent or alleviate our adverse impacts upon the life of the oceans, if only in those cases where this is deemed to be in our own best interests. There are opposing views about the quality or extent of responses on the different sides of the debate on this issue. What isn't disputed any longer is that the more ancient material there is, the more genetically inflexible living populations will tend to be.

Before exploring the impacts and causes of marine life emergencies in more detail, however, we would do well to make a brief journey through the world of the present threats to the biodiversity of the world's oceans and the urgent need to act a lot more rapidly to produce effective remedies.

Marine habitats are today getting much dirtier than they were, and the oceanic food webs that we aim to manage in more sustainable ways are usually much more widely contaminated than terrestrial ones. Finally, we would do well to remember that we no longer may depict our civilization's activities, attitudes, and aspirations in virtually any ways that are decent without reference to their impacts on marine biodiversity.

Understanding Marine Life Emergencies

A marine life emergency occurs when there are significant negative changes in an ocean ecosystem, such as environmental shifts, toxic spills, or natural phenomena that harm marine life. Known marine life emergencies include high-profile phenomena such as oil spills, mass mortality events, and shark attacks.

A more complex issue is sometimes called "incremental degradation," which refers to cumulative or "chronic" factors that alone might not drastically change an ecosystem, but together can cause significant change and lead to an emergency. The complexities of this crisis have led to a conceptual framework to understand what creates it and how to respond. At the most fundamental level, there are two types of causes of the emergency: natural and human-induced.

Natural causes of the emergency act from a more global perspective than human causes. The chain of events includes root causes such as climate change and general environmental degradation and shifts, phenomena such as hurricanes and heat waves, and on-the-ground effects such as habitat destruction. Human-induced factors are direct human activities that worsen the effects of natural emergencies. They can include minor pollution of water, but with noisy behaviour from the public, can gain enough attention to be "scaled up" into a full marine emergency.

These are the general chain of events it would take to get from root environmental change to minor toxicity to an emergency. Causation is complex, and these can be interconnected; for example, the emitting of greenhouse gases by nations causes global climatic change and can also cause the gradual lowering of the pH of the oceans, yet again damaging marine habitats. When a cause is revealed, a reaction is often possible to reduce its impacts. There is considerable knowledge now of what environmental changes can interfere with the healthy functioning of specific habitats or species in the marine ecosystem. In general, the subtler an effect, the more difficult it is to undo, and the more systems are affected at the same time, the more urgent it is to react.

Natural Causes

Global marine life emergency events are occurring frequently. Some of these events are due to natural disasters caused by climate change, such as hurricanes, oil spills, and earthquakes. Two such natural disasters severely affected sea creatures. Another hurricane also affected marine life by causing mass freshwater flows into saline bays or estuaries.

The increased influx of freshwater can have lethal and sublethal effects on fish populations. Different types of natural disasters result in different ways of impacting marine life. Hurricanes and typhoons modify water temperature, salinity, tides, and dissolved oxygen levels. Climate change is one of the major causes of marine life emergencies. It is threatening the marine environment and has increased the severity of marine life emergencies in terms of extent, frequency, and duration.

Climate change disturbs the environment by increasing the temperature of the Earth and causing the melting of the polar ice caps. Ocean acidification in the Northeast Pacific is evidenced by a dramatic reduction in pH over the past decade in a region known as the sector of the ocean due to water mass formation in high-latitude polar regions that upwells off the coast. Many such events are causing marine life emergencies: changes in sea surface temperature due to a climate phenomenon, nutrient runoff, and coastal marine pollution, to name a few.

Incrementally, the intensity, duration, and frequency of these events have contributed to marine community stress, and the decline of many species, and have triggered cascading effects across multiple species within the biotic community. Thousands upon thousands of dead starfish, as well as crabs and smaller creatures, have washed ashore, enveloped in grey goo stretching far along the coast. Certain snails are washing up again on the west coast of North America. Fiddler crabs are dying in droves. River mussels are dying in rivers across America. Understanding the causal factors driving such events can be valuable for developing conservation and management strategies. Such emergency events underscore the vulnerability that is intrinsic to marine ecosystems and the necessity of developing ecological resilience.

Human-Induced Causes

Despite the perceived impracticality of 'getting sick mysteriously', experts can pinpoint several reasons for marine creatures 'diseasing', stressing the substantial human cause of these events. Of all the angles through which to approach these questions of emergency and causation, human-induced causes (both direct and indirect) are focused on in this chapter.

There is now compelling empirical evidence of the destructive relationship humankind has with the ocean. The most obvious human threats are pollution, direct physical disruption and/or noise, light, and heat production. Countless examples of industrial waste, ghost nets, and chemical runoff could be proffered. The seas are now strewn with a variety of toxins, and the biota can no longer 'carry the load'. For instance, certain chemicals can cause inherited cancers in marine creatures.

The most immediate natural danger for marine animals occurs through ingestion or entanglement of these plastic residues. Of the 49 recognized 'garbage patches' or 'plume-like aggregations', the Great Pacific Garbage Patch of 2013 is the best-known example. Here, the highest diverse amount of plastic played host to '3 million pieces of plastic weighing approximately 60,000 kg in the top 40 centimetres of the water surface'. Many marine species get caught in such waste. Ghost nets lead to various forms of mortality for whales: drowning, suffocation, and hunger. The same goes for marine algae, or those animals in particular that breathe through filtering, like certain types of molluscs.

Moreover, many marine animals struggle with overeating unintentional plastics. While the discovery of macroscopic waste in marine environments is somewhat of a novelty, human-induced chemical pollution and the concomitant damage to marine life are as old as humanity - and possibly even predate humankind, as certain archaeological evidence suggests. Thus, global response to the problem of microplastics and their impact on marine flora and fauna is paramount and has many fillips. Given the sheer bounty of the ocean, the importance of finding a sustainable protectionist formula for the marine environment is clear. Only a coordinated effort between governments and potentials for grassroots change can truly make a difference; from the ground up, conservationists and coastal activists must continue to raise awareness of the stark reality of the marine plight.

Response Strategies

There are two kinds of intervention strategies relevant to the protection and preservation of marine creatures. The first are preventive measures that work to stop marine life emergencies from occurring to begin with. These focus on reducing risk factors. For instance, various kinds of public policies, including sustainable development principles for land use and water management, can contribute to the preservation of resilience of the targeted ecological areas.

Implementing early warning systems and management programs are preventive intervention strategies that can help to prevent threats to harbours and waterways from turning into a crisis. Part of them is making the local community aware of the negative impacts that the loss of animal life can have on it.

Another is a preventive response, which includes formal training and access to tools like Environmental Impact Assessments for activities that have the potential to cause a great number of animal deaths. During a marine wildlife incident, several response strategies may be employed, and depending on the emergency, the type, scope, and scale of response may differ. More organized and united attempts to formally intervene during an event include the distribution of resources across agencies from different levels of government as well as from non-governmental organizations and the local community.

Research and modification can be a part of this response. After the event ends, an array of strategies for providing immediate relief, rehabilitation, and support for the recovery and resiliency of the impacted fauna and their environments is involved. To increase the likelihood of success, all of these strategies will draw on knowledge and the science of marine wildlife response and recovery. Strategies should also include monitoring and evaluation to ascertain the effectiveness of response actions. It may also be vital to work in an integrated approach, combining such diverse theoretical spheres as threatened species strategy, rescue operations, psychological first aid, and public health.

Preventive Measures

In an emergency room setting, patients may require acute medical care before receiving a regimented medication regime. In this section, we consider ways to avoid marine life emergencies or prevent an issue from escalating to a crisis. The primary goal of stopping an event from happening can generally take two forms: primary prevention to avoid an event from initial occurrence or secondary prevention to ensure an event does not escalate as much as it might otherwise.

The most important primary preventive measure to avoid a marine life emergency is to cease engaging in activities that are known to lead to negative consequences. Objectives such as avoiding overfishing, practically ceasing the discharge of oil in the ocean, and removing PCBs and heavy metals from effluent are necessary to improve marine health and thereby avoid marine life emergencies.

Preventive measures do not need to be predicated on any specific knowledge of problems, focusing instead on broad-based approaches to sustainable environmental management. To avoid a marine life emergency, one needs to foster good practices and ethics through education and social marketing. This tool involves informing people about the consequences of their lifestyle on the marine environment and how they can participate in preventing the decline of marine ecosystems.

To foster appropriate behaviour, clear rules are needed, and the players breaking the rules need to be held accountable. This includes law enforcement and international cooperation concerning fishing vessels and oil tankers avoiding inspection of their oil safety equipment. Finally, information about the condition of marine ecosystems is needed to guide the participants in their actions.

Emergency Response Protocols

When marine life emergencies occur, organized measures are taken to manage these crises. Coordination between the Ministry of Environment, the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, the Japan Coast Guard, NGOs, and local bodies is made so that the emergency response is organized. We do not have any specific laws to manage marine life emergencies at this time.

Instead, we have established an emergency response protocol on our own for marine life emergencies based on the Marine Emergency Measures Officers Meeting. Three types of protocols and criteria have been established according to the type of marine life emergency. One is about a rescue operation, such as taking the affected marine life out of the sea. The second one is about the rehabilitation of affected marine species due to a large amount of mortality. The third one is about the restoration of habitats and landscapes damaged by an oil spill.

One of the most important factors in managing marine life emergencies is monitoring and assessments. Usually, marine environmental strategies and solutions set the environmental quality standard to improve marine environments. In the case of marine life emergencies, real-time assessments are particularly important because we can identify changes in environmental and biological indicators after an emergency has occurred. At that time, an emergency assessment can be used to communicate with the public to inform them of the changes that may affect their lives.

Third, public relations activities play an important role in conducting rescue operations or taking other measures in response to emergencies in the sea. An emergency environmental monitoring plan has been developed, and daily monitoring is being carried out in response to large-scale damages in the marine environment. Communication strategies and action plans for stakeholders and the public are summarized. It is recommended that such a manual be developed in other areas for emergency response or communication of lessons in the wake of a large marine casualty. Finally, responders need to have received the appropriate training to perform their duties.

Conclusion and Future Directions

In summary, the essay argued that many marine life emergencies are the result of natural factors, human activities, or a combination of both. They are frequently triggered by one chain of events, while other risk factors may exacerbate the effects. Emergency responses are often reactive and aim at mitigating existing threats to human livelihoods.

To avoid emergencies, we must no longer manage threats as isolated incidents, but instead fully acknowledge the importance of understanding the multi-layered risk factors affecting marine systems and their threats to marine animal species more holistically. Any exploitation of marine resources has to take into account the impacts of multiple activities. This includes a solid understanding of risk factors and thresholds and the potential responses of species and ecosystems to any proposed interventions. It is also important to understand whether or not natural hazards trigger further anthropogenic impacts and how both stressors interact.

Tips for decision-making, trade-offs, and future directions: conservation efforts have been focused on mitigating the impacts of human activities in the marine environment, while responses to natural disasters have been the responsibility of societal authorities and emergency response teams. In the context of the ocean, decision-making frameworks are needed that integrate the potential impacts of both types of threats. Reducing our reliance on the ocean means making tough trade-offs. It comes back to getting the balance right.

Can we be more proactive in terms of which species or ecosystems we invest in? Can we make them more resilient so that when these marine life emergencies occur, we are better placed to address the impacts over time? Building resilience to crises in the coastal and marine environment will require a whole-of-society approach that addresses synergies in human, ecosystem, and human well-being connections. Future research that enables us to understand these trade-offs and synergies and provides guidance on how to increase resilience in the toughest of real-world settings will be of great value.