#4: Slime Is Turning the Seas Into Dead Zones

More than half the fish that people hunt in the sea are gone, more than half the corals are gone too, and pollution is strangling vast stretches of seafloor. Writing in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences last August, marine ecologist Jeremy Jackson of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography sounded an ominous tone: “Mass extinction of multicellular life will result in profound loss of animal and plant bio­diversity, and microbes will reign supreme.”