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Just as the land has ecosystems such as the Arctic, Prairie and Rainforest, so does the ocean. The best known of these marine ecosystems is perhaps the coral reefs.
Ecosystems are communities of organisms that interact with their environment that are defined by oceanographic parameters such as temperature, depth and latitude. The balance between these communities vary year by year as the physical conditions that bound them change. The result - they are in a constant state of flux.
When conditions change, the community of organisms may change from the bottom up, such as when the algae or sea weeds, on which predators ultimately depend, change with altering weather. Topdown changes can also occur when specific predators put pressure on selected prey items.
 Since humans joined the marine food web as the dominant predator, we have exerted topdown pressures on selected organisms. Long term, severe pressures can destabilize marine ecosystems by simplifying the number of interdependent links – in other words, reducing the ecosystems’ complexity. These effects can cascade down the food web and eventually lead to a collapse of ecosystem function. For example, removal of sharks from a reef can lead to an increase in algae at the expense of the reef-building corals. This causes a loss of habitat for the coral reef fish settlement and the collapse of reef function.
Such collapses frequently result in ecosystems that are dominated by bacteria and microbes. This has already occurred in America’s NE large marine ecosystem, with the collapse of the cod stock. Events such as this are happening all over the world, including America’s EEZ.
Properly managed, marine ecosystems can provide our human population with significant food resources in perpetuity.
It is the objective of AOC to restore all of the ecosystems of America’s Exclusive Economic Zone to a stable state within normal patterns of variance, with maximum productivity for humans and other members of the ecosystem such as whales, seals, seabirds and turtles.
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