Who isn’t a sucker for a good surfing movie? And if it happens to feature the gnarliest wave of them all–Mavericks–then I think it’s going to be worth a look.
“Chasing Mavericks” is about surfer Jay Moriarty’s quest to surf, and survive, Mavericks’ epic break. Yes, there will be lots of manufactured drama. But judging from the trailer there will be also lots sweet surfing footage. It opens later this month.
First we hunted them to near extinction, and now scientists estimate there are perhaps 25,000 blue whales left on the planet. They are magnificent creatures, and most humans hope their population will grow and thrive.
But human love for a species is often dangerous, because when humans love something they want to see it, be with it, and experience it. They put the human experience, and human desires, over the animals’ experience and the animals’ needs. Sometimes that means putting animals in zoos and marine parks. Sometimes it means invading wild habitats and disturbing natural life rhythms. And it seems that is what could be happening with blue whales, particularly in the waters off Sri Lanka (ironically because the end of a civil war is making tourism safer).
Throw in commercial shipping, which is not as deadly as actual whaling, but deadly nevertheless, and you have humans–despite their recent love for blue whales–once again putting pressure on a dwindling population.
Here’s the New York Times, putting it all together:
The problem is particularly troublesome here in Sri Lanka, where a largely unstudied population of blue whales, possibly numbering in the thousands, has come under increasing pressure from commercial shipping and from a boom in unregulated whale-watching boats.
Because these waters are poorly monitored, scientists do not know for sure whether ship strikes are on the rise. But the whale’s death in April was already the sixth of the year, according to news reports. In one grisly encounter in March, a blue whale was found draped over the bow of a container vessel in the harbor in the capital, Colombo, 90 miles north of this beach resort. Last year, some 20 whale carcasses (not all of them blue whales) were seen around the island, according to Arjan Rajasuriya, a research officer with the National Aquatic Resources Research and Development Agency in Colombo. It is not known how many of the deaths resulted from ship strikes.
“These strikes likely represent only a portion of the likely true mortality,” said John Calambokidis, a whale researcher in Olympia, Wash., who documents ship strikes off the West Coast of the United States. Because blue whales often sink soon after they are struck, most such deaths go unrecorded, and Dr. Calambokidis says the true number “could be 10 or 20 times” the number seen.
Fifteen miles off the southern coast of Sri Lanka is one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes, and whales are known to swim regularly inside them. But some scientists believe that the increase in whale watching could be forcing whales to seek food farther out, pushing them into the big ships’ path.
“I’m afraid the whales are being harassed by the whale-watching boats and that this could affect their movement,” said Asha de Vos, a whale researcher here.
The result, in the photo taken by Madzak Radjainia and published as part of the NY Times story, is dead whales floating near Sri Lanka, with ship strike injuries (they published a great video report as well).
It doesn’t have to be this way. Some day humans may gain the wisdom to realize we need to give much greater weight to the needs of other species, even if that means compromising on human desires and needs. An example would be accepting that even when we love a species we don’t have the right to disturb it in its natural habitat, and that doing so can do real harm.
Chart-palooza: Well, since we were infographic heavy today, we might as well keep the chart train going. So here are ten charts which prove the planet is warming.
Seeing Is Important: It’s become one of my most deeply held beliefs, and this National Geographic photo gallery on dolphins and whales are they as being hunted today shows why. You see, you believe and care. So looking at images like this is brutal but necessary.
Lance Undone: I love cycling, so I’ve been following the doping crisis, and Lance Armstrong’s role in it, for quite some time. But even if you are not a cyclist, Lance’s story, in the form of this documentary, is worth listening to, because it is about more than cycling. It is about self-interest and money. It is about deceit. And it is about a win at all costs modern culture that does not take others, or community, into consideration.
To complete today’s infographic trifecta, below is a graphic representation of land and ocean temperatures for Sept. 2012. All that red is enough to make tie it for the warmest September ever, according to NOAA.
Here’s the backstory, courtesy of Weather Underground’s Dr. Jeff Masters:
September 2012 was tied with 2005 as the globe’s warmest September on record, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Climatic Data Center (NCDC). Global temperature records begin in 1880. NASA rated September 2012 the 4th warmest September on record. September 2012 global land temperatures were the 3rd warmest on record, and global ocean temperatures were the 2nd warmest on record. September 2012 was the 331st consecutive month with global temperatures warmer than the 20th century average. The last time Earth had a below-average September global temperature was in 1976, and the last below-average month of any kind was February 1985. Global satellite-measured temperatures in September 2012 for the lowest 8 km of the atmosphere were 5th or 3rd warmest in the 34-year record, according to Remote Sensing Systems and the University of Alabama Huntsville (UAH). Wunderground’s weather historian, Christopher C. Burt, has a comprehensive post on the notable weather events of September 2012 in his September 2012 Global Weather Extremes Summary.
It seems that government agencies can’t agree on everything. But I think it is safe to conclude they are all saying September was pretty darn warm. And what really jumps out at me are the two sentences I boldfaced.
It’s insane that we are having a debate about whether warming is really occurring instead of what we should be doing about it (ahem–carbon tax). That is an epic failure of leadership, and the triumph of self-interested denialism. History will not be kind to this willful ignorance.
(Click image for full size).
I guess it’s infographic day down here in the bunker.
This one gets at the question raised by the U.S. Navy’s proposal to “take” 33 million marine mammals over the next five years. And if that’s the savage price the Navy thinks the world’s oceans should pay in exchange for sonar and weapons training, it’s worth looking at what sort of military competition our Navy is facing. Must be fierce.
Oh, wait (click image for full size).
Sorta feels like we are in pretty good shape, and that doing a lot less live sonar and weapons training, or doing it ALL in simulators, would not really jeopardize US naval power.
(via)
I see a lot of stories that I think are interesting, and thought provoking. But often I don’t have much to add, or time to go deeper. So I’m going to start posting links on a regular basis, so the stories don’t get lost.
Definition Of A Tragedy: Last wild Siamese crocodile found….strangled. She was estimate to be 100 years old.
Sorcerer’s Apprentice: Californian idiot, I mean businessman, dumps 100 tons of iron sulfate into Pacific, in illegal ocean geoengineering scheme to gain carbon credits.
Unhappy Happy: the sad story of the elephant who helped prove how intelligent and self-aware elephants are.
An interesting study recently confirmed something sad that I have suspected for years: that despite the fact that humans are actively trying to protect whales in the North Atlantic, human culture and human lifestyles are so intrusive and damaging that we still end up killing whales.
This comes from a story in Nature:
Human activity is still killing right whales, one of the most endangered animals in the ocean. An analysis of four decades of whale deaths shows that attempts to prevent them have not had a demonstrable impact.
Only around 460 North Atlantic right whales (Eubalaena glacialis) are thought to be swimming the waters off the eastern seaboard of Canada and the United States. The governments of both countries have implemented several measures to protect whales from becoming entangled in fishing gear or being hit by ships, such as the US ‘ship strike rule’ that limits vessel speeds in certain areas. That rule came into force in 2008 and is due to expire next year.
Marine-mammal researchers Julie van der Hoop and Michael Moore, both at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and their colleagues, analysed all known deaths of eight species of large whale in the northwest Atlantic between 1970 and 2009. During that time 122 right whales died, along with 473 humpbacks (Megaptera novaeangliae), 257 fin whales (Balaenoptera physalus) and scores of whales of other species. When the authors were able to assign a cause of death, ‘human interactions’ was the most common, appearing in 67% of cases. Entanglement in fishing gear was the main cause of death in this category.
The protection measures seem to have had no impact on whale deaths, according to the study published online in Conservation Biology1. Although several of the rules were implemented only towards the end of the study period, Moore still admits that the finding is “hugely disappointing”.
We can decry the age of whaling, in which humans were wiping whales out one after the other. But that was an age when the killing was both intentional and highly technological. It’s almost scarier to think that the way humans live today means that whales die, even though we (mostly) don’t want them to. In other words, there is something deeply wrong about the way in which we live today.
The main culprit appears to be our fishing practices, which are egregious enough in terms of what they do to fish stocks, quite apart from how they affect whales (and all the other species which also become collateral damage).
I feel the same way about industrial fishing as I do about industrial farming, though industrial fishing does not seem to attract the same intense opposition–perhaps because fish are not considered as intelligent and sentient as farm animals. But that certainly doesn’t mean that industrial fishing isn’t as environmentally shortsighted, and criminally wasteful (and in many instances it is cruel, as well).
But whatever you think about the emotional lives of ocean fish, and the moral issues around killing them, it’s hard not to sympathize with whales that get entangled or killed by fishing equipment. And judging from the reaction of this humpback, anything we can do to further limit the damage to whales from fishing would be much appreciated.
Let’s start the week on an upbeat note, with this video story, courtesy of Farm Sanctuary, about the bonds between an adopted calf and his accidental family.
It’s a sweet story, and also a reminder that it would be very hard for people to keep eating animals if they knew anything at all about their emotional lives. Meat-eating requires a purposeful ignorance, which the meat industry is only too happy to encourage.
If you want to know more about Farm Sanctuary, and the vision of its creator, Gene Baur, I’ve got you covered:
This is stunning, and a perfect example of how the inertia of stale priorities–especially Cold War-era national security priorities–can take us down some disastrous roads.
From a New York Times editorial:
Between 2014 and 2019, the United States Navy hopes to conduct testing and training exercises in the Atlantic and the Pacific that will involve sonars and explosives of many different kinds.
Over the years, the Navy has been forced to acknowledge what science has clearly demonstrated: noise generated by sonar and underwater detonations can kill marine mammals, like whales and porpoises, and disturb their normal feeding, breeding and migration. In preparing for its upcoming exercises, the Navy has asked the National Marine Fisheries Service for approval to “take” a number of marine mammals — “take” being the broad term for everything from killing these creatures to disturbing their habits.
This all sounds as it should be, with the Navy requesting permission from the agency, as required by various laws protecting marine mammals and endangered species. But the numbers say something else. In its testing areas in the Atlantic, the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific, the Navy estimates that between 2014 and 2019 it will “take” nearly 33 million marine mammals — everything from blue whales to elephant seals.
Most of these creatures will be disturbed in some way but not injured or killed. But the damage could still be considerable. Sound travels much faster through water than it does through air, magnifying its impact, and many of the sounds the Navy plans to generate fall in the frequencies most damaging to marine mammals. More than five million of them may suffer ruptured eardrums and temporary hearing loss, in turn disrupting normal behavioral patterns. As many as 1,800 may be killed outright, either by testing or by ship strikes.
So we’ve got whales versus sonar and naval training. That’s a trade-off that needs a much closer look, as the New York Times urges.
The Earthist Chronicles 