Human beings are the only species on the planet actively working to destroy ourselves. We’ve contributed, and continue to contribute, to global warming.

The Paris Agreement happened, and we weren’t having any of it – America promptly elected Trump to take care of that problem.

One of our greatest weaknesses is oil. We will literally destroy everything in our path to get our hands on it. If that means we have to take on a 420 million-year-old species of fish, so be it.

Business Insider reports:

South Africa’s last known colony of coelacanth, fish that have survived for more than 420 million years, could be under threat from oil exploration, conservationists warn.

Italian energy group Eni plans to start six deep-water oil wells in a 400km long exploration block known as Block ER236, near the iSimangaliso wetland park in South Africa.

This is set to threaten the future of a colony of roughly 30 coelacanths living off the Sodwana coast, which is only 40km away from the northern boundary of the Eni exploration area, and nearly 200km north of the first drilling sites.

Take a look at the face on this guy (bottom left corner, also the fish). That’s how you should feel about this.

“The Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 decimated fish populations – so if we had an oil spill off iSimangaliso it is very likely it could wipe out these coelacanths,” said Dr. Andrew Venter, the chief executive of the Wildlands Conservation Trust.

The trust is one of many conservation groups fighting to expand South Africa’s protected ocean areas.

The bright blue coelacanth, weighing as much as an average-sized man, were thought to be extinct until a living specimen was caught off East London in 1938. Further captures off the Comoros islands and Tanzania definitively proved they were not extinct.

They’ve survived just about everything that’s happened to the earth over the last couple million years.

What does it say about us, if we’re the thing that kills them?

Not cool.

You can find a more in-depth look at the fish’s plight over on the Smithsonian Mag.

[source: businessinsider]