Member-only story
Threats posed to the marine environment by untreated ballast water treatment
While the world is significantly brought closer through technological innovations, there have been serious environmental concerns evolving with it as well. On one side the cultural exchange amongst humans is considered good for increasing the homogeneity of the world population. There are some fields, separate ecosystems that are best not to be introduced with each other. Nature has a beautiful mechanism of maintaining balance through food chains, where one organism is hunted down by another while the hunter by another, and resultantly a stable, sustainable ecosystem is established. When a foreign organism gets introduced into the ecosystem which doesn’t have a well-defined position in the food chain, the organism predominantly enjoys a relative amount of freedom, with unrestricted opportunities for growth. Such a phenomenon could be recalled through the infamous rabbit plague in Australia, where rabbits introduced by first settlers rapidly grew to an uncontrollable number seriously affecting the local crops, fauna, and flora. Something similar is currently happening with marine life, while the shreds of evidence of such incidents are not as visible as it was in case of Australian plague, damage caused by it and environmental deterioration are far more serious. While one might wonder what causes this to happen in the first place, the main source causing the introduction of such invasive organisms in ballast water.
