Whaling – Page 4 – Learn to Dive Today Blog

Series: Whale Wars, Season 2

Tony and I devoured Season 1 of Whale Wars, and moved straight on to Season 2. The series chronicles the annual efforts of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society to stop the Japanese whale hunt in the Southern Ocean. The Japanese claim that taking whales for research is legal, and the Sea Shepherds swear it is not (and apart from that, object to the killing of whales in any context).

The Japanese claim that they need to harvest 900-1,000 whales for lethal research, carried out under the auspices of their Institute for Cetacean Research (ICR). After doing the research, the Japanese pretend to eat the whales. Actually whale meat is not popular food any more in Japan, partly because of its content of toxic chemicals, but apparently it’s culturally important to have a lot of it available. Amusingly, the ICR website is devoted largely to explaining how much research is done (five papers per year after killing 1,000 whales seems a bit paltry), but very little in the way of facts and actual research results. There is also a massive section containing video footage of “harrassment and terrorism” – namely Sea Shepherd’s activities around the Japanese fleet.

The Sea Shepherds use their vessel, the Steve Irwin, to pursue the Japanese whaling fleet (three harpoon ships, a factory ship, a spotting ship and a supply ship), and to interfere with their activities. In the first season of Whale Wars, tossing smelly and slippery chemicals and attempting to deploy prop foulers was sufficient to keep the whalers on the run and not fishing.

During the whaling season depicted in this season, however, two things combine to make their task almost impossible. One is that the Dutch government, under whose flag the Steve Irwin sails, instructed the Sea Shepherds that they could not throw anything from the deck of the ship, but they had to launch the RIBs and operate from the smaller boats if they wanted to toss chemicals or other items at the Japanese. The second obstacle was that the Japanese equipped their vessels with high pressure water hoses, stern lines (to foul propellors), and hanging nets protecting the deck from hurled bottles of butyric acid. The result is a number of fruitless attempts to interfere with the massive factory ship (the Nisshin Maru) from the tiny rubber ducks, which are just too small to allow the throwers to get anything over its bow. The sides and rear of the ship were protected by nets and hoses.

Several aggressive confrontations with the whaling fleet are shown – an almost disastrous foray deep into the ice, and high seas manoeuvering reminiscent of what you’d see in Master and Commander take place. The Japanese fleet engages the Steve Irwin repeatedly, pursuing her and – in a reversal of roles – keeping the Sea Shepherds on the run.

It is in the final few episodes of the season that the Sea Shepherds engage most aggressively (and, they felt, successfully) with the whalers. This culminated in the Steve Irwin ramming one of the harpoon ships as she transferred a whale to the factory ship. There are photos here, and video footage here and here. This action, apart from angering the Japanese, causing a mini diplomatic crisis, and damaging the Sea Shepherd boat, did not actually prevent anything from happening that wouldn’t have otherwise. In contrast to previous years, the Japanese fleet simply continued with their whale hunt as if the Sea Shepherds were not there.

The whaling process was largely unseen in the first season, but this time the Sea Shepherd’s helicopter pilot witnesses the slaughter of a whale and it is captured on film. It’s awful – first the whale is chased until exhausted (unable to take enough deep breaths to dive while being pursued), and then shot in the spine with a harpoon the size of an artillery cannon. Multiple shots to its head with a rifle, and then a slow (25 minute) drowning in its own blood while attached to the harpoon complete the process. It is simply not possible to kill an animal this size humanely and it was horrible to watch. The carcass is tied to the railing of the harpoon ship and taken to the factory ship for slicing and packaging.

We found this very entertaining and thought provoking, and (one of the eleven episodes, in which the whale hunt is shown from beginning to end) very upsetting. (There is a warning at the start of episode ten not to watch if you’re a sensitive viewer.)

You can buy the DVD set here if you’re South African, and here or here otherwise.

Sea life: Southern Right Whales

Note the v-shaped blow and white callosities of the southern right whale

During the months of July to October, False Bay plays host to southern right whales (Eubalaena australis), who visit the bay to calve and nurse their young. They are frequently seen very close to shore. These whales can be distinguished by the white growths, or callosities, which appear on their heads. Their mouths are very distinctive, with a strong arch shape. These are baleen whales – they don’t have teeth, but instead have sheets of keratin, forming a massive filter feeding system.

They can dive for up to six minutes, and when they exhale, they emit broad V-shaped jets that can be as high as five metres. These whales can be up to 17 metres in length, and are inquisitive, boisterous and relatively slow swimmers, though they can accelerate in short, impressive bursts.

Southern right whales are very social during their time in False Bay

If you’re the one South African school child who never got taught this, they are called right whales because when they were harpooned their blubber-rich bodies floated on the surface, instead of sinking. This made them easy to transport and retrieve – the “right whales” to hunt. (This is a surprisingly good read on old fashioned whaling – how it worked explained in simple terms, not the ethics behind it.)

Right whale cavorting in Smitswinkel Bay

They have no dorsal fin. That, the callosities, and the V-shaped blow should help in distinguishing them from the other cetacean guests (dolphins, orcas, Brydes whales, and humpback whales for example) that visit False Bay.

This list of sightings in False Bay indicates that they can arrive in the bay earlier than July! Here are some photos taken one September in Smitswinkel Bay. Here’s a photo of a whale giving some surfers the fright of their lives.

Series: Whale Wars

Whale Wars is an Animal Planet series that follows Captain Paul Watson and the crew of the Steve Irwin, a Sea Shepherd Conservation Society vessel, as they attempt to interfere with the activities of Japanese whalers in the Southern Ocean. Sea Shepherd is described in the series as a “rival conservation agency” (kind of like a rival shark conservationist… bleugh!) to Greenpeace, of which Paul Watson was one of the founders (according to himself, but not according to Greenpeace – you be the judge). He was later expelled from Greenpeace after disagreements on tactics.

While Greenpeace are described by one of the Sea Shepherd crew as engaging in “ocean posturing” – getting themselves photographed, and taking pictures of whales and “raising awareness” – Sea Shepherd are aggressive and confrontational, using physical means (nonviolent, but the definition of violence is fluid) to prevent the Japanese whalers from continuing with their activities. They throw smelly and slippery chemicals at the whaling vessels, attempt to foul their propellers with ropes (Tony was desperate to see this succeed – four failed attempts later and he’s still hoping).

The seven episodes of Whale Wars season 1 follow two voyages of several months by the Steve Irwin. Her crew is largely made up of untrained (and pretty clueless, by the looks of things) volunteers – of the nearly 40 people on board, only five seemed to know anything about ships, strategy, planning and life at sea. They don’t really know each other, either, making teamwork tricky and outright dangerous. The hazard of this is immediately apparent. In one early episode, while launching a rubber duck off the side of the Steve Irwin using a crane, one of the supposedly very experienced crew allows the nose of the boat to drift out at an angle while it was in the water next to the main ship, instead of keeping it perpendicular to the direction of motion (and the swells). Almost immediately the rubber duck is swamped and overturned, dumping its four crew into the freezing water. Turning the ship and rescuing them is a mammoth task. During this fiasco another crew member gets over-enthusiastic and damages a rotor blade of the Sea Shepherd helicopter, which is used to track the whalers at a distance. Later in the series the rubber duck crew set off at dusk without any communication equipment, in the wrong direction. The man in charge (Captain Watson was asleep) vacillates and ums and aahs, refusing to initiate a search. He feels vindicated when the crew of the RIB returns safely, but it is a classic case of evaluating a probabilistic decision on its outcome rather than on the thought process behind it.

Captain Watson doesn’t issue many orders. It’s often repeated that the hierarchical structure on board the ship means that he can devote his energy to strategising rather than giving commands. That said, I did not like his leadership style at all. In one instance, he wants his crew to launch the RIB at night and go on a risky mission to harrass a Japanese spy ship that has been tailing the Steve Irwin. He refuses, however, to issue an order to that effect, saying the crew must decide. When they decide not to, he humiliates them and ultimately manipulates them into going. In the event that the mission had gone wrong (a broken crane stopped it in the early stages), he would have been able to abdicate responsibility for the poor outcome because he hadn’t ordered it directly.

While much of the series documents the crew injuring themselves and each other and damaging their equipment, it concludes with a very satisfying pursuit of the factory ship where dead whales are processed and packaged for shipment to Japan. This enormous vessel exudes menace and has daunting dimensions, meaning that instead of using the RIBs, the Steve Irwin must approach her directly in order to harrass her.

Captain Watson plays the media like a violin, calling them every time the Japanese do anything and making sure to put his own spin on every incident. In the final episode of the season he finds a bullet in the bullet proof vest he was wearing, but seemed to play this down after initially claiming he was shot at by someone on the Japanese ship. The absence of entry marks on the clothing he was wearing above the vest was a little suspicious, to my mind.

I was very worried that we’d see a lot of dead and dying whales in this show. Fortunately the only actual whaling one sees is part of a clip that is played in the opening credits illustrating what the Japanese whalers do and how they claim that their activities are for research. Their whaling boats have RESEARCH written on them in large letters (in English). When the Sea Shepherd crew are doing what they come to Antarctica to do, no whaling takes place.

It’s wildly entertaining television that also left us thinking afterwards. I found it hard to form firm opinions on what the Sea Shepherd activists were doing, because I wasn’t sure whether they were demonstrating admirably strong convictions, or whether they had moved into a realm of fanaticism, beyond logic. I couldn’t decide whether risking their lives (often simply as a result of poor planning, poor training and disorganisation) on behalf of whales was noble, or reckless stupidity. Not everyone on board the Steve Irwin was there for the same reason – some love whales and believe that every single cetacean life is sacred, while others simply want an adventure.

Here’s a critical perspective on the show. It’s fascinatingly polarising, even if you do love whales and don’t want to see them killed under the pretext of scientific research.

You can buy the DVD set here or here.

Bookshelf: To Sea and Back

To Sea and Back: The Heroic Life of the Atlantic Salmon – Richard Shelton

In his afterword, Richard Shelton says he wanted to write a book about “life’s meaning around the life cycle of the Atlantic salmon.” It’ll take me another reading or two to find life’s meaning here, but Shelton certainly ranges far and wide over fairly significant subjects. He is the chairman of the Atlantic Salmon Trust, but has had a varied career.

Shelton is a naturalist at heart, and loves the outdoors. The central thread running through this book is the amazingly complex life cycle of the Atlantic salmon, but there are digressions along the way into a wide range of subjects. Some of these topics, such as global warming (about which he is surprisingly sanguine), the ethics of whaling and life as a gamekeeper in Scotland at the turn of the 20th century can be considered tangentially relevant to the primary subject at hand. Others, such as the Reformation, the history of the use of rat skins in making clothing, and the virtues of insects as food, are bafflingly difficult to place in the overall arc of the narrative.

One is left with an impression that these fish, who are born in rivers (many in Scotland) and go through the stages called alevin, fry and parr, migrate to sea for a few years (at this stage they are called smolts), and then return as grilse to the river of their birth to breed and (eventually) die, posess a life cycle of enormous complexity. And this is true – the fish do not all return to their birthplace at the same age, or spend uniform amounts of time as a parr. Research into what triggers the various physiological changes in the bodies of the fish is difficult and time consuming given that they spend most of their lives in the open ocean. (I’d recommend Nature’s Great Events for a better visual idea of what salmon do when they return to their birth river to breed.)

Shelton also touches on the complexities of farming these fish. I was encouraged that there are some farms (Shelton mentions one in the north of Scotland) that seem to be succeeding in raising healthy, strong fish in humane conditions.

Shelton’s writing, however, sometimes actively works against the reader labouring to develop an understanding of these enigmatic fish, and I would have preferred a more linear narrative structure in order to better get a handle on the changes that are undergone by Atlantic salmon during their lives. In a sense this book can be compared to Mark Kurlansky’s book Cod, which also presents a fairly whimsical and nonlinear natural history combined with a recipe book.

Subjects of surprising depth and profundity are touched upon by Shelton, and I think it is important to read this book not simply as a natural history of a brave, magnificent fish but as the musings of a writer with wide ranging interests and life experience. I particularly enjoyed the sections concerning research cruises on oceanographic vessels.

You can read some other reviews of this book here, here and here.

Finally, here’s a useful word: anadramous, referring to a fish that spends most of its life in the sea but returns to fresh water to breed.

The book is available for purchase here if you’re in South Africa, otherwise click here.

Bookshelf: Atlas of Oceans

Atlas of Oceans – John Farndon

I confess that I was not totally enamoured of this book when I started reading it. It seemed overly simplistic, but by the time I finished it I realised that its author had neatly summarised both the wonder and variety of the world’s oceans, and the threats facing them from human activity.

Boasting a foreword by Carl Safina, whose most well-known book is Song for the Blue Ocean, the book is written by John Farndon, a prolific children’s author, and published by Yale University Press. Farndon is British, as is evidenced by his assertion, during a discussion of the warming effect that the Gulf Stream current has on the north Atlantic ocean, that Great Britain has a very pleasant climate. No one else – except perhaps an Inuit – would make such a claim.

Farndon’s credentials as a science writer for children make this volume a pleasure to read – he deals with wide ranging and fairly complex topics, but in a completely understandable way. The book is well illustrated with photographs (some – such as ones of a row of narwhal and a calving ice shelf, of dubious quality), diagrams and maps. The sections each cover two facing pages, so it’s quick to dip into and finish reading a section before bed (for example)!

Special sections focusing on particular habitats (such as coral reefs or the ice), wildlife (I was particularly charmed by the highly endangered vaquita) and issues (mainly related to conservation) are spread throughout the book. Farndon lays the groundwork for a basic understanding of our oceans by covering concepts such as ocean tides, currents and physical oceanography, and then moves on to specific sections on each of the world’s oceans. He also writes about the major seas, such as the ones in Europe and the South China Sea.

This isn’t a long or complex book – it’s under 250 pages long – but comes with a glossary, a list of endangered species (including their status of endangerment and scientific name), suggestions for further reading, and contact details for a long list of ocean conservation organisations. It’s the kind of book that I will dip into frequently – there are some useful photographs (one of the marks left on the seabed by bottom trawling fishing boats springs to mind) and maps (I liked the one showing the whole 2% of the world’s oceans that are in marine protected areas – MPAs) and excellent coverage of the overfishing problem facing us today. Also dealt with are oil spills, whaling, global warming, coral reef and ice shelf destruction due to warming of the oceans, dead zones that result from fertiliser runoff into the sea, and anything else you can think of that impacts the health of our oceans.

An edited extract from the book can be found here, along with a magnificent photo of a basking shark. I recommend it, and it’s suitable and accessible for anyone from a precocious ten year old and up. It’s the sort of book you could give to someone who doesn’t know much about or care particularly for ocean matters, and it would bring them right up to date (and probably make them care).

You can buy the book here if you are in South Africa, and here if you’re not.

Bookshelf: Eye of the Albatross

Eye of the Albatross: Visions of Hope and Survival – Carl Safina

Carl Safina‘s second book (which I read after his first – Song for the Blue Ocean – and third – Voyage of the Turtle) is superficially concerned with seabirds, but, as is usual for him, dealing on a deeper level with the health and future of the world’s oceans and the life they support.

Amelia, a Laysan albatross fitted with a satellite transmitting tag, is at the centre of the book. Safina recounts the voyages she makes from Tern Island, an island in the French Frigate Shoals of the northwestern Hawaiian islands. Her chick having hatched, Amelia spends up to a few weeks at a time away from him, flying thousands (literally) of kilometres looking for food for both her chick and herself. Beautiful maps detail her circular routes.

Safina speculates as to her activities while she is away foraging, based on knowledge about the diet and habits of albatross. I was amazed at how she found her way home – often flying on a perfectly straight course after turning back towards Tern Island – and how she made her way along the edges of undersea canyons and along the tops of seamounts that she had no way of seeing. Instead, her sense of smell guided her to places where deep water wells up bringing nutrients, and attracting diverse sea life that would be suitable for food.

Like the tuna fish Safina describes in Song for the Blue Ocean, albatross are superlatively constructed and magnificently adapted creatures. They spend up to 95% of their lives at sea, mostly in flight, and are uniquely built for this. Their wings lock open, and require no muscular effort to keep them unfurled. They seldom fly higher than 15-20 metres above the sea surface, and take advantage of natural wind patterns to cover vast distances. Food – particularly in the clear, warm Pacific – is scarce, but this is where they breed and lengthy trips north are thus required to find squid, jellies, and other tasty albatross snacks.

Safina also meets and lives with researchers involved with seabirds, Hawaiian monk seals, and turtles, and even spends time on a fishing boat off the Aleutian Islands of Alaska, which is where Amelia came foraging on one of her several-thousand mile trips. (Unlike in his other two books, Safina does not include a passage glorifying sport fishing, which is refreshing. He even seems to feel something as he watches a sablefish die.) I read Tony the entire section on Alaskan crab fishermen – while Safina doesn’t actually meet any, the Alaskan fishermen he does meet describes them as “brutal people” and says that it’s rare to find anyone over 30 on the deck of a crab boat. It was an interesting confirmation of what we’ve seen on Deadliest Catch, although seeing the men only on board ship doesn’t really let us decide how brutal they are! (The fact that every boat seems to boast at least one crew member with a recent criminal record should have tipped us off, though.)

Unfortunately, as in almost every other book I’ve read about the ocean, the Japanese do not come off covered in glory. Japanese ships systematically wiped out albatross on several Pacific islands, killing hundreds of thousands of birds for their wings and for the feathers on their breasts. The corpses – wingless – were left to rot. Since albatross return to breed where they were born, these populations will never recover. The cultural antagonism this rouses in me – fanned by what I know about Japanese whaling, tuna fishing and their respect for international conservation laws and bodies – is intense, and I would like reasons to feel otherwise.

The scope of this book is massive, and, as with his other work, Safina does not apologise for apparent digressions. His descriptions of the life of a fieldworker on a remote island – whether studying seals, birds or marine life – are fascinating, and the characters he describes add dimension to the book. While this kind of work often involves immense privation and isolation, the rewards and opportunity to spend time so close to wild things are very special. It is upsetting that, even on the most isolated islands, masses of plastic rubbish washes up daily on the beaches, and alien species such as grasses, rabbits, and rats have decimated local plants and animals unaccustomed to the competition and predation. No spot on earth is the pure, untouched paradise one hopes is lurking out in the ocean somewhere.

Safina’s writing is extravagant, detailed and sweeping. If you want a scientific treatise on seabirds, this isn’t it. There’s a lot of information here, but Safina’s concern is more with evoking an emotional response and intellectual wonder, than with presenting a highly organised set of facts.

I cannot wait to see an albatross!

The book is available here if you’re in South Africa, otherwise here. If you want to read it on your Kindle, go here.

Documentary: Sharkwater

Rob Stewart is an underwater still photographer who decided to make this film at the tender age of 22. The original plan was to produce a documentary of “pretty pictures of sharks.” He spent the next four years on the road, filming sharks and getting mixed up with Captain Paul Watson and the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society (like Greenpeace but with weapons, they attempt to enforce international conservation laws in international waters – using tactics which range from throwing acid, ramming and sinking other ships, to damaging fishing gear, and direct confrontation).

The documentary is thus a blend of beautiful images of sharks in their natural habitat, and drama on land and on board the Sea Shepherd vessel that Stewart hitches a ride on. In Costa Rica they uncover a massive shark finning operation to which the government is turning a blind eye, and are arrested thanks to corrupt officials paid off by the long line fishermen they encounter and harrass offshore. Stewart travels to the Galapagos Islands – thought at one stage to be a safe haven for sharks – too, and the images of the wildlife there are astonishing.

This is an upsetting film. Unlike Disney’s Oceans, the footage of shark finning is real and horrifying. There are several scenes of seals and turtles being killed, and one image in particular, of the beak being removed from a living turtle, kept me from sleeping the night after I watched this. The murderous extravagance of fishing tactics such as long lining are shown here in some detail, and at times I could understand wanting to go out and sink a Norwegian whaling ship (Sea Shepherd sank a whole fleet of them, once!) or ramming a poacher’s boat to put a stop to this kind of activity.

Stewart doesn’t offer any concrete solutions – his film is more a call to action than a manifesto for change. Solving the issues of poaching, shark finning and long lining require changes not just in individual behaviour, but – in several cases – cultural mores and preferences. A brief interview with a young Asian bride – clearly educated – who says that she refuses to serve shark fin soup at her wedding (despite the prestige attached to this dish), is hopeful. Conservation is only possible after addressing the issues of poverty that force (or seem to force) coastal populations into plundering the ocean without regard to conservation status and the livelihood of future generations.

This is a beautifully filmed and heartfelt documentary effort that juxtaposes the beauty of the underwater environment with the ugliness of many of those who benefit from its wealth. Stewart loves sharks, he loves to photograph them, and for those who do not share his love, he repeatedly emphasises their role in the ecosystem as top predators. Their presence throughout the existence of complex life on earth has shaped behaviours present in creatures lower down the food web, such as schooling and camouflage.

The DVD is available here for South Africans, otherwise from here. There is also a book of photos from the documentary available. The official website for the documentary is here.

Documentary: Blue Water White Death

It’s hard to believe that this film was made in 1969, but one is periodically reminded by the ridculously short and embarrassingly tight shorts favoured by the men, and the odd bouffant hairstyle sported by a lady. The quality is fantastic given that it was made over 40 years ago – Tony’s laptop (our favoured DVD-watching device, since we don’t have a television) wouldn’t play it full screen, and I only realised half way through that this is probably a function of the size and quality of the film on which it was shot.

I had a bit of a head start on this movie, having read Blue Meridian, which describes the entire filmmaking process from the point of view of a relative outsider, Peter Matthiessen. The premise of the movie is to find and film great white sharks underwater; the actual results take a long time to achieve, but are quite spectacular.

The intial parts of the film show the crew setting out from Durban to film the sharks that eat the whales harpooned off the KZN coast. Tony got very nostalgic seeing his hometown as it looked when he was a boy, and pointing out the places he and his friends used to hang out (no doubt also sporting ridiculously short shorts, though on my husband I don’t mind) near the harbour and on the Bluff.

The Durban whaling station only closed in 1975 – the footage of sperm whales being pursued and shot is horrifying and very upsetting. It’s a completely barbaric activity – you should read Sylvia Earle on the subject, and Willard Price for a surprisingly accurate depiction of how the whaling process worked (and still works, in some cases – I’m looking at you, Norway and Japan). There’s some later footage – almost equally upsetting – one of the team riding a turtle by holding onto its shell.

It’s dispiriting to see how little seems to have been learned about the movements of great whites since 1969 – the filmmakers did not sound any less authoritative or sure about where to look for the sharks or what their habits are, than anyone today seems to be. Their footage of great whites, filmed in South Australia, was the first of its kind in the world, and is quite spectacular given the state of underwater camera equipment forty years ago.

The shark cages they used were designed by Peter Gimbel (who dived the Andrea Doria the day after it sank), and float independently of the boat with compressed air devices to raise and lower them in the water column. I can’t say I would feel terribly comfortable being untethered from the boat when there’s a 5 metre great white in the water with me… When the stills photographer gets stuck in a cage while one of the sharks is attempting to detach a large piece of horse meat that was wisely tied to the bars of the cage, he’s tossed about like a leaf and the cage is bent and broken beyond recognition. He eventually manages to cut the piece of meat free and thus get rid of the shark, but if he hadn’t the shark would have persisted until either the cage broke open or he swallowed the meat and the rope and whatever was attached to it.

You can get the DVD here. It’s stood up really, really well with the passage of time.

Bookshelf: World Ocean Census

World Ocean Census: A Global Survey of Marine Life – Darlene Trew Crist & Gail Scowcroft

This is the second book I’ve read on the global Census of Marine Life, the first being Discoveries of the Census of Marine Life by Paul Snelgrove. I enjoyed this book far more, and found it much more accesible than Snelgrove’s book, which I think is of primary usefulness for the pages and pages of academic papers he cites at the end of each chapter. Not being an official ocean researcher per se, those didn’t interest me.

This book explains the census clearly and is well written (unlike Snelgrove’s efforts). The census takers sought to answer three questions:

What lived in the oceans? To do this they used old restaurant menus, whaling ship logs, fishing records, and all and any sources that could shed light on marine biomass in the last 500 years (their chosen focus period, coinciding with the start of large scale fishing). I would have liked to read more about this part of the census – trawling through the logbooks of whaling vessels sounds fascinating!
What lives in the ocean? For this part of the census they used all the cool toys, tags and tracking devices described in Discoveries of the Census of Marine Life.
What will live in the ocean? The census takers sought to quantify man’s impact on the oceans, and to determine how human interaction with the ocean – past, present and future – will impact the future health of our seas.

Interspersed with this information are magnificent photographs of some of the creatures discovered, and a few of the census takers at work. There are one or two human interest stories: for example, about the impressions formed by a school teacher from Utah who went to the Antarctic as a census volunteer for a month.

The authors explain the process of officially codifying the discovery of a new species, and how laborious it is. Despite the fact that they have an estimated 10,000 new creatures brought to light by the census, in the ten years since the census began fewer than 5% of them have been officially named, catalogued and accepted by science.

If you had to choose between this and Discoveries of the Census of Marine Life, choose this book. You can purchase the book here if you’re in South Africa, otherwise click here.

Bookshelf: The End of the Line

The End of the Line – Charles Clover

This book should be billed as compulsory reading for anyone who eats fish. Clover, a journalist, describes from various perspectives the effects of overfishing on the world’s oceans. The European Union comes in for a particular roasting, on several counts – which surprised me, because I thought it would be primarily the Japanese who get it in the nose for their exploitation of bluefin tuna.

As a mathematician, I am horrified by Clover’s indictment of the mathematical models used to manage fish populations. The more sophisticated these models have gotten, the less effective has our management of wild fish populations been. There is also (as usual) a disturbing disconnect between the mild-mannered scientists doing the work, and the public policy makers and governments who are chiefly interested in preserving their own status – of necessity a very short-term view of things.

That said, it is incredible how quickly wild fish populations have been decimated and even destroyed. Clover describes the piscine bounty that awaited the pilgrims arriving on the Mayflower in 1620, and describes how the same fishing grounds are now closed because there is simply nothing left to catch.

My favourite (and the most hopeful) part of the book was the section on marine reserves, and I was delighted and astonished to learn about Goat Island in New Zealand, about 90 kilometres north of Auckland. The reserve was established in 1975 and opened to the public in 1977 (it’s now a HUGE attraction for tourists and locals alike – refer to Sylvia Earle’s comments on the value of the whale watching industry as opposed to whaling for another example of how marine life can have more value alive than dead), and both Clover’s book and my internet wanderings confirm that the ocean there now teems with life to such an extent that children stand knee-deep in the water at the beach, surrounded by shoals of curious fish. Here’s Clover’s description of the place – I would LOVE to visit it!

Leigh is perhaps the world’s best example of what natural ecosystems look like when they are left alone, without fishing pressure, for a long time. The reserve has exceeded its founders’ original expectations, and not just from an ecological point of view. Before it was earmarked as a reserve, Goat Island was a popular fishing spot for fishermen. Conflict arose with the marine lab because, as Wilson put it, “people kept eating the experiments.” The reserve was created, after twelve years of lobbying by Ballantine and his colleagues at the university marine lab, for narrowly scientific reasons. Ballantine is the first to admit that he never foresaw what an attraction the reserve would become…

We stood looking at these unexpected beneficiaries of science. Most were families who had driven out of Auckland for the day to stand in the clear sea water and gawk as a profusion of fish swam around them. Others came to snorkel, renting a wetsuit on the beach for a few dollars, or to stare through the glass panel of the boat at the fearless shoals of large snapper, blue maomao, and spotties that swam above forests of kelp, only yards from the shore…

What happened to the ecosystem was also unexpected. Snapper are the most prized sporting fish on this coast – and for that reason increasingly small and scarce. In the 1,370 acres of the reserve, the largest snapper are eight times the size of the snapper outside. They are also fourteen times more numerous. Brochures tell you that you will also find butterfly perch, silver drummer, porae, red moki, leather jacket, blue cod, red cod, goat fish, hiwihiwi, butterfish, marble fish, red-banded perch, and demoiselles – all swimming around without fear of people and within a few yards of the shore. Indeed, they have so little fear that they may nibble you to see if you are edible.

Most of this marine menagerie is readily visible to an inexperienced eleven-year-old snorkeler in a rented wetsuit… Further out, in deeper water accessible to more adventurous divers, are delicate gorgonian fans, lace corals, sponges, sea squirts, and anemones. Under the kelp forests, hidden in holes and crevices in the rock ledges, are big rock lobster, or crayfish, much larger than those in the commercially fished waters outside…

This makes me kind of wistful when I think about what our coastline could look like, if the MPA permits were properly administered and the money collected went to actually protecting the ocean and deterring poachers. (Contact Underwater Africa if you want to stay up to date on this issue.)

In my post about sea urchins I mentioned how juvenile abalone shelter among urchins. When the rock lobster population gets out of hand, too many urchins (their favourite food) get eaten, and the population of abalone is affected. In the same way, the food chain has been severely disrupted in oceans around the world through the activities of humans. Furthermore, instead of restoring a balance by removing fishing from the equation in the worst affected areas, other top predators such as seals have been allowed to multiply unchecked. We aren’t allowed to catch undersized cod, but seals certainly are! Here’s Clover’s description of how the food chain is supposed to work, in the Goat Island reserve:

When the reserve was created, explains Ballantine, there was nothing particularly special about the marine ecology. The rocky coastal reefs were known as “rock barrens” because nothing grew on them. The most common bottom-living species were large sea urchins, which graze on kelp. As in other parts of New Zealand’s northeast coast, the kelp forests had virtually disappeared by the 1960s. The connection between the disappearance of the kelp and overfishing became clear only when the Goat Island Reserve had been established for many years. At a certain point,the undisturbed snapper and crayfish reached a size at which they could prey on the kina, or large sea urchins, that fed on kelp. So the kelp forests gradually returned, bringing in turn food and shelter for many other species of fish and shellfish. Biologists call this a “trophic cascade”, when the recovery of predators at the top of the food chain has effects that flow down to lower levels.

The book is written in a journalistic style, but it’s not always easy to keep track of the facts that Clover throws at one. He adds a bit of local colour with interviews with fishermen and officials, but some maps would have gone a long way towards demonstrating the extent of the problem and educating those less knowledgeable about North American geography than… well, who DOES know about American geography? (I doubt many Americans do!)

I also felt that Clover could have made more of just how incredible the different fish are, as marvels of nature. He mentions that the bluefin tuna can accelerate faster than a Porsche, and for many of the deep-sea fish he lists the very advanced ages they can attain (some over 100 years), but there’s very little sense of wonder in his descriptions. As you will be when you read this book, I think he may have been overwhelmed by the numbers and lost track of the victims in all of this.

The magnitude of the problem seems completely insurmountable, and as an individual there seems little to be done. I would encourage you, however, to read this book and be sensible about the fish choices you make. It’s both a human health issue – when we run out of fish, our diets will be MUCH poorer for it – and a conservation issue. Get hold of a SASSI card. Keep your conscience clean when eating seafood! Perhaps that can be a new year’s resolution for all of us…

The book is available here. I’ll do a review of the documentary based upon it as soon as we get a chance to watch it!