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Anonymous
>>271552
Well, not nessesarily, especially if you're talking about the coasts. The vast majority of coastal ecosystems have a massive dependence on nutrient run off, and then you have esturine species, or species that come into esturine places to breed. With any massive change in coastal ecosystems there would come a massive change in undersea coastal ecosystems and that would eventually reverberate around the world. Also, there would be massive changes in reef systems if you remove all of the fauna. Some plant/alagal species will go beserk without the constant grazing of vertebrates, and again, that would lead to drastic ecosystem change. Maybe in the deep ocean there won't be a huge amount of change, especially if you're talking about smaller species that feed directly on nutrients, but as soon as you move away from single cell organisims into verterates or invertebrates, things get very, very complicated. Generally speaking, I think that your average ecosystem could stand to loose a small number of larger species, but once you start taking away the smaller beasties, drastic things happen. Again it all comes down to your definition of 'animal'. It's okay saying, "People will be fine if they live on the coast," but you're forgetting that squid and fish are wild animals. The problem is that all animals EXCEPT domestic ones would disappear. Hence, by definition, NO FISHIES.
Possibly, if a small amount of people live on the coast near edible algal matts gone rampant in the absence of other grazers they can surivive, but frankly, not very well in the long run.
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