Arabian Sea Preservation Efforts Aim To Save 'Unique Marine Environment' (PHOTOS)

From National Geographic Magazine:

Today human hands are reaching deep into Arabia's seas and taking more treasure than the seas can possibly replenish. Overfishing, pollution, seabed dredging, and massive coastal modification are crippling marine ecosystems by degrading water quality and exacerbating toxic algal blooms. In 2010 a group of marine scientists described the region's most strategic waterway, the Persian Gulf, as "a sea in decline," bedeviled by a storm of malign influences. "If current trends continue," they wrote, we will "lose a unique marine environment."

One of the groups at greatest risk are sharks. Of all the insults to Arabia's marine life, none is more grotesque than the mountains of shark carcasses that arrive every evening in the Deira Fish Market in Dubai, trucked from landing sites around Oman and the United Arab Emirates, from there to make their way east—a stinking tide of fins and flesh.

Images and captions courtesy of Thomas P. Peschak and National Geographic. All images are from the March 2012 issue of National Geographic magazine.