Moby Dick, or the Whale — by Herman Melville audio free download click here |
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From The Sunday Times May 10, 2009
How we are emptying our seas Human exploitation of the seas has changed them forever, writes Callum Roberts, professor of marine conservation at York University |
Imagine sitting on the cliffs of Dover contemplating the sea on a crisp spring day.
Today your eye would be drawn by the crawling shapes of cargo vessels, ferries and fishing boats.
Wind back the clock to the seventh century, however, and the scene would be very different.
Instead of shipping, you would watch the passage of great whales on their northward migration from African wintering grounds to Arctic feeding areas.
At the season's peak, over a thousand whales might pass in a day.
Today few whales are sighted in the English Channel, because we have decimated their numbers by hunting.
The slaughter began in the Bay of Biscay and English Channel around the ninth century and, by the early Middle Ages these abundant animals sustained a vigorous whale fishery that was conducted from coastal bays and inlets along their migration routes.
Records suggest that numbers were declining as long ago as the 12th and 14th centuries.
The depletion of those stocks offers a good explanation for why Basques whalers were so quick to exploit newly-discovered Arctic and Canadian whale populations in the late 16th and early 17th centuries.
Over the following centuries – in Scotland right up until after the second world war – whales were pursued relentlessly.
Those left are a small fraction of former numbers.
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By the 18th century, for example, the Atlantic grey whale had been driven to extinction.
Nowadays, despite being protected, the northern right whale is down to the last few hundred animals and faces the same fate.
How do we know how big whale populations once were?
Whaling records, historians and others all describe the abundance of these beautiful creatures.
One 16th century writer reported how whales were “ever present, familiar guests” around the coasts of Scandinavia.
Nowadays we also have DNA studies, showing a level of genetic diversity that could only have been achieved by huge numbers of animals.
How different the seas must have been then, in both spectacle and ecology, but it is not just whales that have dwindled over the centuries.
Our propensity to pursue marine wildlife extended beyond whales to porpoises, dolphins, basking sharks, angel sharks, tunny, skate and halibut and a host of other ocean megafauna.
Bone remains from medieval times tell of a Humber Estuary population of bottlenose dolphins that disappeared for good over a hundred years ago.
In the 18th century, porpoises were described as so common they sometimes darkened the sea as they rose to draw breath.
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Large predators were sustained by populations of prey fish, pilchards, herring, sprat and others, far greater in abundance than those present today.
In the United States, an unexpected consequence of the depletion of large sharks, like tigers and hammerheads, has recently been uncovered.
When the big sharks disappeared one of their former prey items, cownose rays, flourished, in turn munching their way through any bay scallops they could find.
Few would have predicted that shark fishing could cause the collapse of a lucrative scallop fishery.
Grey whales are submarine bulldozers, feeding on clams and other animals buried in the seabed.
In the Pacific, historic populations of grey whales numbering near 100,000 animals once raised as much sediment in the Arctic as is dumped today by the equivalent of 12 Yukon Rivers.
Steve Palumbi of Stanford University estimates that nutrients in this sediment would have fuelled plankton blooms that would feed a million seabirds.
There are no Grey Whales left in the Atlantic, but their role as ecological engineers has been replaced by prawn trawls that raise millions of tons of sediment as they sweep back and forth in chilly northern seas.
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It is difficult to know in how many other ways the ecology of our seas has been restructured as a result of hunting and fishing.
Historical ecologists will argue over this subject for years to come.
For the rest of us, the loss of the seas’ spectacular megafauna is a matter for sadness and regret.
Callum Roberts, Professor of Marine Conservation Environment Department, University of York York, YO10 5DD. See website for more information on historical losses of marine megafauna http://www.york.ac.uk/res/unnatural-history-of-the-sea The Wildlife Trusts marine megafauna campaign http://www.wildlifetrusts.org/?section=marinebill:seasofplenty Killer whales face cull after finding taste for rare otters http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6256515.ece  © Copyright 2009 Times Newspapers Ltd |
Published on Tuesday, January 23, 2007 by the Guardian / UK
Tuna Stocks Close to Exhaustion, Says WWF by Justin McCurry
Japan's huge appetite for tuna will take the most sought-after stocks to the brink of commercial extinction unless more rigid quotas are agreed, wildlife campaigners warned yesterday.
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WWF said that although Japan was the main culprit, burgeoning demand for tuna from other countries, such as China, had increased the threat to stocks.
"Tuna are fast disappearing, with important stocks at high risk of commercial extinction due to weak management," the group, formerly known as the World Wildlife Fund, said in a statement.
"Atlantic bluefin [tuna], used for high-end sushi and sashimi, is massively overfished and the spawning stock of southern bluefin in the Indian Ocean is down about 90%."
The warning came at the start of a five-day meeting in Kobe, Japan, of the world's five biggest tuna fisheries management organisations, which cover 77 countries and regions.
"We are deeply concerned about the future of global tuna stock.
"We must strengthen our cooperation to tackle the issue," said Toshiro Shirasu, director general of the Fisheries Agency in Japan.
About 2m tonnes of tuna were caught worldwide in 2004 and 530,000 tonnes went to Japanese markets in 2005, according to the Fisheries Agency.
Japan, which consumes more than half of the world's catch of at-risk Atlantic bluefin tuna, admits overfishing, but blames poor communication between its fishermen and denies it has fished illegally.
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Last October it agreed to halve its catch of southern bluefin to 3,000 tonnes a year over the next five years.
A month later, the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tuna agreed to cut this year's bluefin tuna quota in the eastern Atlantic and Mediterranean from 32,000 to 29,500 tonnes, raising fears in Japan of a steep price rise.
New quotas will not be decided this week, but campaigners hope members of the five regional bodies responsible for managing tuna stocks will agree to share data.
"For the first time, there's general agreement by the governments that something significant has to be done," Alistair Graham of WWF told Reuters.
Proposals include requiring fishermen to produce certificates of origin for their tuna catches and for fish to be monitored between capture and market.
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007
Common Dreams © 1997-2006 |
April 11, 2006 The Disappearence of Big Fish
By ROBERT OVETZ
Endangered Species in a Can?
It's common knowledge that we are running out of oil. What's not so well known is that we are also running out of big fish.
The harsh realization that catches of big fish-marlin, sharks, swordfish and tuna-are declining rapidly is beginning to sink in.
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The UN Food and Agriculture Organization considers about 75 percent of all fish fully exploited, over-exploited or depleted.
The crisis can be seen most extremely across the Pacific, the world's largest source of tuna, where catches are shrinking along with the average size of the fish.
Today a 70 pound swordfish — which is too young to have even reproduced — is considered "a good sized fish" and can be legally landed in the US.
Just a few short decades ago the same fish averaged 300-400 pounds and could be caught close to shore with a harpoon.
In the past two years, the Pacific has seen quotas, restrictions on catches, freezes on effort and even moratoriums.
The US longline fleet had to shut down for the second half of 2005 in the Eastern Pacific.
Japan and China were not far behind.
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Just last December, the new international body with the unwieldy name Western and Central Pacific Fishery Commission imposed a freeze on further efforts to catch bigeye and albacore.
Throughout the Pacific, it is widely documented that these two species have recently joined the lucrative southern bluefin tuna on the overfished list.
In fact, southern bluefin already has a step up on its cousins and is considered an endangered species by the World Conservation Union.
Shameful shark finning has also caused numerous shark species to plummet as well and a few sharks such as the great white to be considered vulnerable to extinction.
All told, recent scientific reports document that the biomass of these large fish have declined by about 90 percent in the Pacific since 1950 — about the time that new technologies allowed us to fish further from shore for longer and catch more fish.
Since then, technology has eviscerated those last areas of the ocean safe from us only because we were unable to reach them and stay there.
The recent announcement last month by the US government that yellowfin tuna is also being overfished in Pacific will undoubtedly send a shockwave throughout the US and the Pacific.
We are now faced with incontrovertible evidence that the lions and tigers of the sea — the ones we feed our children for lunch — are disappearing fast.
Imagine the day when cans of tuna, a staple food source for millions of Americans, can no longer be found. According to the warning signs that day may already be here.
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That's bad news for the dozens of impoverished Pacific island nations that have leased their national waters for pennies on the dollar to foreign industrial longline vessels to catch and export their fish primarily to the US, Japan and the EU.
For some of these nations, these meager licensing fees contribute as much as 70 percent of their GDP.
When greed and waste finally leads to collapse of these fish, millions of people throughout the Pacific will sink even further into poverty.
Canneries are already cutting their hours or even shutting down for want of fish. Stories of crews mutinying or being abandoned in foreign countries by captains who couldn't pay them abound.
The days of three cans of tuna for a $1, a vivid memory from my childhood, are long gone.
The way out of this crisis is to catch less and pay more while staying out of critical areas of the ocean.
It only seems fair that the countries with the resources should receive a far larger share of their $2 billion a year resource and still have some of the big fish around to attract far more lucrative game fishing tourism.
The US has taken the right step by restricting longline fishing for tuna in the Eastern Pacific and banning it on the West Coast.
Now it's time to put the pressure on other countries to do the same.
Otherwise we may start having to add these fish to the endangered species list.
Robert Ovetz, PhD is the Save the Leatherback Campaign Coordinator with the US-based Sea Turtle Restoration Project. |
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"Things I've seen and that I've lived" |
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Tuesday, 7 December, 2004
Fish areas 'need drastic action'
The marine environment requires drastic and urgent action to save it from further destruction by fishing fleets, says an influential report.
The Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution says the changes needed will be "painful" in the short term.
Continuing with only piecemeal adjustments will leave the fishing industry with little future, it argues.
The commission wants to see 30% of UK waters become marine reserves closed to commercial fishing.
In its report: 'Turning The Tide, Addressing The Impact Of Fisheries On The Marine Environment', the commission (RCEP), which advises the government, says society has given far less priority to marine conservation than to protecting the land — something it says needs to change urgently.
Its report focuses on the impacts of fishing in the north-east Atlantic, the area covered by the Ospar Convention on the protection of the region's marine environment.
Shift in emphasis
It looks especially at the fisheries regulated by the European Union's Common Fisheries Policy and at the waters around the UK.
It says the UK government will need to apply pressure at the European level to realise the report's recommendations.
The report says: "The precautionary approach needs to be applied comprehensively to fisheries management.
"Currently, the marine environment is regulated on the basis of a presumption in favour of fishing... we recommend that the presumption should be reversed."
The commission says protected areas can benefit the entire marine ecosystem, from spawning fish to deep-living organisms and the seabed itself.
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Several reserves established on Georges Bank, off the north-east coast of North America, have seen species recoveries, with the density of scallops increasing up to 14-fold within five years.
While less than 0.5% of the world's oceans are protected, some countries have gone much further, with New Zealand and South Africa aiming to designate 10-20% of their waters as reserves.
The commission wants the UK to establish a network of marine protected areas within five years, leading to the closure to commercial fishing of 30% of the country's exclusive economic zone.
RCEP chairman Sir Tom Blundell told BBC Radio 4's Today programme that without such measures, "many of the fish populations will just collapse".
He said: "We have almost all of the industrially fished populations down to between 15 and 20% throughout the world. This is a catastrophe.
"We believe an absolutely radical change is required."
The report says the running costs of reserves to protect the North and Irish Seas would be £9-15m annually, compared with about £35m a year to run the national parks in England and Wales.
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It says a global reserve system covering 30% of the oceans would cost £6.5-7.5bn a year, less than the £8-16bn spent in subsidies to commercial fisheries.
The RCEP wants the UK to adopt "a decommissioning scheme to reduce the capacity of the UK fishing fleet to an environmentally sustainable level, and ensure similar reductions are made in EU fleets that fish in UK waters".
'Safe limits'
It also wants the government to review the funding available to promote economic diversification in areas dependent on fishing.
Fisheries minister Ben Bradshaw told Today that the fight to preserve marine life was the "second biggest environmental challenge the world faces after climate change".
But he said it would be premature to implement the measures recommended by the RCEP.
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Mr Bradshaw said: "We need to give more time for the radical measures that we have already taken to have an impact.
"There has been some very painful decommissioning already undertaken in Scotland, which has reduced the size of the Scottish white fish fleet.
"We don't rule out the possibility of having to take radical action in the future, but there are signs that cod is beginning to recover and other stocks are doing very well.
"It doesn't seem reasonable to take action that puts fishing communities out of business, and then the stocks recover but you have no fishing industry left to take advantage of that."
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The RCEP says some of the effects of current fishing practices are ruinous: a recently-introduced net with a mouth the size of 50 football pitches, for example, and bottom-trawlers which plough furrows up to 6m wide and 0.15m deep for many km across the seabed.
It cites a report by the International Council for the Exploration of the Seas which says the proportion of north-east Atlantic fish stocks within safe biological limits fell from 26% to 16% between 1996 and 2001.
The RCEP's warning is stark: "A continued regime of too little, too late will ultimately leave many sectors of the industry without a future."
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Wednesday, 17 December, 2003
Fishermen peer into annual abyss By Alex Kirby
BBC News Online environment correspondent
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The annual round of European Union talks to agree permitted fish catches is starting in Brussels.
The commission, the EU's executive arm, is proposing to maintain the deep cuts in cod quotas imposed last year.
Scientists say cod catches should be banned completely in the North Sea, the Irish Sea and off western Scotland, to give the stocks a chance to recover.
But many trawlermen say the fish are plentiful and think the scientists are missing clear evidence of abundance.
The fisheries ministers' meeting is expected to last until 19 December, with sessions continuing overnight as they have in previous years.
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Last year saw the UK fleet forced to accept a cut of 45% in North Sea cod and fishing days were reduced to 15 days a month.
The UK Fisheries Minister, Ben Bradshaw, said last week the negotiations would take place against "a difficult background of scientific advice".
While prawn, haddock, herring and mackerel stocks were in good shape, he said, there was a serious problem with white fish, and with cod in particular.
But he hoped the council would agree in principle to move from setting catches annually to a longer-term "multi-annual" approach.
Mr Bradshaw said: "We hope very much if we can get agreement in principle on this, it will let the commission feel it can be a bit more generous on some of the TACs (total allowable catches) and catch quotas."
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Louis Belanger works in the EU office of WWF, the global environment campaign.
He said: "The future of Europe's fish stocks depends on ending unrealistic and politically driven fish quotas, the main cause of the current crisis.
"Short-term political dealing is not the answer to the long-term recovery of fish stocks."
Dr Ian Duncan, of the Scottish Fishermen's Federation, believes the fisheries crisis is not anywhere near as severe as the scientists and politicians say it is.
Different information
He told BBC News Online: "The stock situation is much better than last year across the board - and that includes the cod, which are not galloping ahead but are certainly showing signs of improvement.
"They're even doing fairly well in the three areas where the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (Ices) wants a total ban on fishing.
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"In the North Sea they are showing improvement, off the west of Scotland they are static, and in the Irish Sea they're improving fast.
"Ices put out what I'd call a well-spun press release several days before their scientists reported. Anyone reading the release would have got the impression things had got worse.
"But the release didn't mention the stocks that were doing well, like prawns and haddock, and the scientists didn't give that impression at all.
Staying in harbour
"The commission is determined to get its cod recovery plan accepted: it's on the table again this week, although it's been rejected twice by the ministers.
"So a key aspect this year will not be catch quotas but fishing effort, the throbbing heart of the commission's plan.
"The quotas are likely to reflect the stock improvement. But the commission wants to cut fishing effort to 10 days a month.
"It's also talking about something called regional advisory councils, which could be an important way of drawing power back from Brussels to the regions, but might just be talking shops."
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Unspeakable grief and horror
...and the circus of deception killing continues...
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Moby Dick, or the Whale — by Herman Melville audio free download click here |
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For archive purposes, this article is being stored on TheWE.cc website.The purpose is to advance understandings of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues. |
A continued regime of too little, too late will ultimately leave many sectors of the industry without a future
