Don't follow the short video and go to the sea! There are too many people, the sea is going to be killed

I don’t know when it started, but the sea-hunting trend has swept short video websites .

Many bloggers who go to the beach to catch all kinds of interesting marine life from the beach, mud and rocky beaches, just like treasure hunting. These videos spread through the Internet, attracting more attention and curious eyes. Gradually, watching others go to the beach can no longer satisfy the appetite of most people, and many people choose to experience the sea-hunting themselves as a holiday entertainment.

“Going to the sea” is quite popular on the online platform | Xiaohongshu

If you also plan to go sea-hunting during the National Day holiday, you might as well read this article first - after all, the fragile beaches cannot withstand the influx of crowds and unscientific ways of sea-hunting.

Crowds of people flocking to the beach

Going to the beach was originally a way of life for coastal residents to "live off the sea". Coastal residents depend on the sea for their livelihoods, and fishing and aquaculture at sea are ways for them to make a living. The tidal rhythm also increases the opportunities for people here to obtain food sources - after the tide recedes, the beach habitat that was originally covered by the tide is exposed, and the clams in the mud and sand and the snails in the cracks of the rocks are all natural delicacies. The purpose of going to the beach is to obtain these delicacies, and the number of coastal residents is limited, so a small amount of going to the beach will not cause too much damage to the beach.

The spread of the Internet has made sea-hunting a form of entertainment. Especially during the epidemic, people are unable to travel far and have begun to turn their attention to nearby coasts; even local citizens who originally did not pay attention to sea-hunting have begun to consider it as a weekend entertainment activity. As a result, countless plastic shovels and buckets have flown to the beach along with human footprints. As the number of participants has increased dramatically, sea-hunting activities have brought an increasing burden to the coast .

Going to the sea to dig clams, they are digging clams, but they are destroying the intertidal zone habitat｜Picture from the Internet

As more and more people go to the sea to catch fish, what kind of problems will arise? One day, I was talking with a friend about the consequences of " destructive sea-hunting ", and I suddenly had the idea to adapt the nursery rhyme "Little Garden" - the lancelets, seaweed seedlings, and seabirds mentioned here are all real victims of sea-hunting activities:

Digging and digging on the beach of Huangcuo, stepping on the soft sand and killing the lancelets;

Digging and digging on the beach of Tangjia Bay, picking flat clams that hurt the seaweed seedlings;

Digging and digging on the big beach, digging small clams and starving the seabirds...

Amphioxus at Huangcuo Beach in Xiamen

The lancelet is not actually a fish, but a transitional organism between lower invertebrates and higher vertebrates. It has remained in its original state for hundreds of millions of years, making it a unique living fossil and a key model organism for studying vertebrate evolution.

Amphioxus has high requirements for habitat environment | South China Normal University

Lancelets like to live in the sand on warm coasts. Usually, they will expose half of their bodies above the sand and bury the other half in the sand, feeding on plankton in the water. Qingdao and Xiamen in China are important distribution areas for Lancelets. Due to their extremely high requirements for living environment, and the increasing changes in the marine environment, the number of Lancelets is decreasing, and they are now listed as a Class II wild protected animal in China .

Huangcuo Beach in the southeast of Xiamen Island is one of Xiamen's special attractions, but part of Huangcuo Beach is located in the Xiamen Amphioxus Nature Reserve . Although a sign has been erected to mark the reserve, because it is close to the tourist area, visitors either do not notice the sign, or even if they notice it, they are still misled by other beachgoers on the beach. It is difficult to build a fence around the vast beach, making it very difficult to manage. A large number of beachgoers trample on the living environment of amphioxus . Even if the people who come to the beach do not take the amphioxus away directly, they have seriously disturbed the stability of its living environment.

The sign of the protected area is not just for decoration | Picture from the Internet

Seaweed in Tangjia Bay, Zhuhai

Tangjia Bay in Zhuhai is located on the east side of the Pearl River Estuary and is a popular place for citizens and tourists to have fun. However, the trend of going to the beach in recent years has changed the atmosphere here and put the several hectares of Baker's salt grass beds in a life-and-death crisis.

The inconspicuous seaweed is actually an endangered species｜Chek Jawa

Baker's salt grass is a type of seagrass. Unlike seaweed, seagrass is an angiosperm with complete root, stem and leaf structures. In the past, people did not pay much attention to seagrass; with the development of marine science, people have discovered that seagrass can not only purify water itself, but also provide food and habitat for many marine organisms . The prototype of mermaids, dugongs, feed on seagrass, and their sharp decline is closely related to the loss of coastal seagrass beds.

Although most seaweeds are distributed in the subtidal zone, which is always covered by the tide and cannot be stepped on by the sea-hunting army, a few species of the genus Halophila can live in the intertidal zone, which will be exposed after the tide recedes. Because of this, the Baker Halophila growing in the intertidal zone of Tangjia Bay has been particularly directly damaged - when digging for clams and other beach shellfish, the sea-hunting crowd will inevitably encounter these small seaweed plants. Many people only regard them as inconspicuous plants, and after digging them out, they throw them aside. Few people think that this small seaweed is actually a vulnerable species on the Red List of the International Union for Conservation of Nature, and is considered one of the 10 seaweeds at risk of extinction .

Zhuhai Tangjiawan Beach｜TuChong Creative

Other “average” beaches?

Even if there are no endangered species on the beach, large-scale activities of fishing can have a negative impact on the beach ecosystem.

"I don't come to the beach to collect clams a few times a year, so how much impact can I have on the beach?"

The fact is, if everyone has this idea, the damage to the beach will be multiplied thousands of times . Resources are limited, and the increase in the amount of beach organisms excavated will naturally lead to the destruction of resources; not to mention the continuous trampling of the beach environment during the process of catching the sea.

If you pick up all the shellfish on the beach, seabirds will starve｜Pixabay

The beach doesn’t just belong to us humans. It also belongs to all the creatures whose life cycles depend on it, including seaweed and seagrass, invertebrates such as clams, sandworms, sand crabs and sea cucumbers that have lived on the beach for generations, and seabirds that stop on the beach to rest and replenish their food during migration.

Ecological sea hunting, observation instead of collection

Beach reserves are different from inland reserves. It is very difficult to achieve completely closed management, and the changing tides over time can easily change the size and location of the beach. To ease the contradiction between the growing demand for catching fish at sea and the limited stability of the ecosystem, we must start with improving our own cognition . If everyone can do the following, I believe that future leisure catching fish at sea will become more orderly and sustainable.

Observation instead of collection

In most cases, we just want to learn about the amazing marine life and go to the sea to catch fish. Material gains are not our goal. Many friends just put some strange-looking small animals in the collection bucket, rather than enough seafood to make a dish for the night.

In this way, we might as well focus on the beach instead of taking the animals home. It is actually more interesting to observe their behavior in their natural habitat (mobile phones can also be used to record), and it also saves us from worrying about the subsequent disposal of the animals - after all, where to throw dead and rotten crabs is also a problem that we have to face after collecting them at the sea.

Just record them with your phone, most people don’t lack this meal｜Pixabay

Collect in the designated collection area

In some coastal areas, the local fishery department will designate specific areas for tourists to catch fish. Although the starting point of this move is to protect the interests of some aquaculture groups, it is also a good reference method: designate specific areas where no endangered species are distributed for everyone to catch fish, and protect important areas .

However, as mentioned above, it is difficult to achieve completely closed management in coastal areas, so the cooperation of the public is very important . Only when everyone understands the intention of demarcating specific collection areas and abides by local management regulations can the division of collection areas play a real protective role.

Gentle collection

Within the designated collection area, collection should also be done in a gentle manner - collect the right amount and pay attention to the method of collection .

Some videos about going to the beach to catch seafood will drain the water from the tidal pool on the rocky beach, which is not advisable. Draining the water once is equivalent to destroying the tidal pool once . The tidal pool will be greatly affected and it will take a long time to rebuild its ecosystem.

Tide pools are small pools formed by seawater remaining in rock depressions after the tide recedes. They range in diameter from a dozen centimeters to several meters and can be home to a wide variety of creatures.｜Alvesgaspar / Wikimedia

Spreading salt to force clams out is also a commonly used method of catching clams from the sea. Although there is no scientific research to prove that spreading salt will have serious negative impacts on the beach, once the behavior of spreading salt to dig out clams increases, it will also harm the small creatures in the habitat where the salt is spread .

It is recommended that everyone use collection tools that will not cause large-scale damage to the beach , and take away the tools and waste generated by sea fishing in a timely manner after the collection is completed. Do not forget them on the beach to avoid leaving future marine debris.

One person digging clams won't have much impact on the beach. But a group of people digging clams can change the appearance of an entire beach.

Garbage left on the beach will harm more creatures | Photo provided by the author

Beaches aren’t just for us humans.

We don’t lose anything by going to the sea less often —every trip to the sea doesn’t necessarily bring back the ingredients for a delicious dinner, and may even increase the risk of accidentally ingesting toxic marine life. However, if we go to the sea more often, we may destroy a precious seagrass bed or affect the physical strength of a group of migrating seabirds.

The impact of each trip to the sea may be insignificant, but the cumulative impact of hundreds or thousands of trips to the sea may cause irreparable damage . The power of the masses should not be underestimated. Whether this power brings protection or harm depends on each of us.

Author: Meow Fish Sauce

Editor: Mai Mai

Title image source: Tuchong Creative