I see stories like this and worry:

California’s delicate marine environment could be threatened by the declining numbers of sea otters decimated by pollution, commercial fishing, and mysterious brain infections, scientists say.

“When the otters are gone the kelp forests change to a barren land” …

And a lot of marine life depends on those kelp forests. And we depend on a lot of that marine life in one way or another. Life on earth is a never-ending network of branching dependencies and we don’t understand half of it.

“Otter mortality is a warning beacon of a degraded marine environment,” said David Jessup, researcher with the California Department of Fish and Game.

“Look at the San Francisco Bay. It used to be so clean that game wardens had to chase down oyster pirates. Now an oyster could not be supported there even in a glass cage.”

We don’t even understand what it is we’re doing wrong half the time. Just look at this:

The sources of pollution have turned out to be surprising. In 2006, the state of California began labeling bags of cat litter with warnings to discourage flushing it down the toilet after scientists found it to be a source of toxoplasma, a deadly single celled infectious organism found in roughly half of the dead otters.

Another land-spawned bug infecting otters, sarcocystis, is traceable to opossum droppings.

Sometimes I just wish everyone could stop everything they were doing and we could take a few decades off to study everything. But not only can we not do that, it wouldn’t work. We have to be doing something in order to have something to study. Human life is the great experiment, and we have to study our own results. Sometimes, they ain’t so good.