Soon we'll be eating phytoplankton.

Well, krill first. The good news is that soon is will be very, very easy to track fish shoals. Bad news are the same.

MIT researchers (Nicholas Makris, along with others at MIT) developed a new remote sensor system, which allows scientists to track fish populations, or shoals, as well as small schools, over a 10,000-square-kilometer area - a vast improvement over conventional sonar technology that can survey only about 100 square meters at a time. The image from published OAWRS imagery shows a fish shoal within an area of 14 x 14 kilometers. Wow! Exciting for ocean mappers, not so exciting for schooling fish. Probably cool for non-schooling fish who will get a competitive advantage. Too bad that most of it is slow-growing and slowly reproducing, thus not reliable as food source for us.

For the description of this new technology see:
Nicholas C. Makris, Purnima Ratilal, Deanelle T. Symonds, Srinivasan Jagannathan, Sunwoong Lee, Redwood W. Nero, 2006. Fish Population and Behavior Revealed by Instantaneous Continental Shelf–Scale Imaging. Science, 311: 660 - 663.

Available online (for subscribers) at www.sciencemag.org.