Category: oceans

Bridging The Gap Between Human And Leopard Seal

I probably posted this sometime in the distant past, but I can’t resist putting it up again because it is one of the most extraordinary videos you will see (and it just popped up on Upworthy, which is proving to be a very worthy site).

Here’s the backstory:

National Geographic photographer Paul Nicklen shares the incredible story of his personal encounter with a predatory leopard seal in the frigid waters of the Antarctic. These photographs–and many more–appear in his book, Polar Obsession. Available at http://www.nationalgeographic.com/books.

PS: Does Nicklen have the most incredible life, or what?

You can see Nicklen’s TED Talk here.

Extraordinary Images

The annual National Geographic Photography contest always delivers. An ocean-themed sampling (click images for full size):

Elephant Seal On South Georgia

Penguins On Antarctic Ice

Atlantic Spotted Dolphins

Of course, the last one is my favorite since it’s a scene I recently witnessed myself.

Forty-seven other photos submitted to National Geographic can be found here.

Whale vs. Volvo 70

This video brings together two things I care about–whales and the Volvo Ocean Race–and luckily neither party was injured. The video shows the New Zealand team, CAMPER, dodging a whale at more than 20 knots.

From the Volvo Ocean Race website:

White water was breaking over the red boat’s bow as the team hurtled at speeds in excess of 20 knots when Bermúdez’s keen eye caught a grey glimpse of the mammal off the bow.

Without a second thought Bermúdez swung the wheel and dodged the whale, avoiding a collision that could have proved costly for the boat and crew.

“With reflexes like a cat he narrowly missed what could have been the equivalent of a runaway freight train colliding with a truck,” Media Crew Member Hamish Hooper said.

“We were doing just over 20 knots and all of a sudden the boat lurched to starboard, just staying in control.

“Nico (skipper Chris Nicholson) popped his head up to see Chuny looking as if he has just seen his life flash before his eyes. I think he had. It would have been seriously bad for both the whale and us.”

As sailboat technology has delivered lighter, more powerful boats that can travel across the seas at ridiculous speeds, collision with anything is increasingly a problem. And collision with a whale at those speeds is a life-threatening problem–both for the crew (which would experience the equivalent of hitting a soft wall at almost 30 miles per hour, which can easily sink a boat, cause head injuries, or pitch crew overboard) and the whale (which would experience a potentially fatal blow from either a sharp bow or keel).

Many race boats have hit whales (here and here, for example), leaving clouds of blood in the water, and usually all the focus is on whether the boat and crew is okay. No one ever really knows (or cares that much) what happens to the whale, but it is reasonable to assume sailboat racing has killed a number of whales (and so far the score is entirely in favor of the humans–no sailor that I now of has died as a result of collision with a whale, though rescues have been required when boats were destroyed).

Side note: of course, every once in a while the whales get their own licks in:

At some level sailboat racing is a pretty frivolous human endeavor, so the death of a whale is pretty hard to justify. Sadly, there does not yet seem to be any real solution to the problem of high-speed sailboats colliding with whales. So add the occasional dead whale (or shark, or sunfish, or….) to the list of things that modern sailboat racing involves.

Must Read: “The Ocean Of Life”

If you want to know pretty much everything on how humanity has exploited and damaged the oceans, since the first humanoid fashioned a crude fish spear or fish hook, then Callum Roberts’ new book “The Ocean Of Life” should be next on your book pile.

Here’s a review in the Wall Street Journal, by my friend Bruce Knecht, who, after an introductory quibble, writes:

Having made this point, I need to now jump up and down myself to say that “Ocean of Life” is an excellent and engrossing work. Mr. Roberts, a British professor of marine conservation, has corralled an astonishing collection of scientific discovery, and he conveys it with non-textbook readability.
It must also be said that the unvarnished realities of what has happened to marine life should outrage everyone. Many of the statistics are not new. In the past 30 years, the populations of the largest marine animals have declined by 75%. Some species have been depleted by more than 90%. Other populations are not even counted anymore because they have disappeared entirely. One of the species that now appears to be on a fast track to extinction is the leatherback turtle, the massive reptile that has existed since the time of the dinosaurs. “There is just one leatherback left in the Pacific for every twenty in 1962, the year I was born,” Mr. Roberts writes. [snip]…
…The steady undercurrent to most of this is bad news, and it leads to a disturbing and seemingly inevitable conclusion: The explosion of human populations, our disrespect for ecosystems, and our ever-expanding demand for seafood and everything else will exceed the natural world’s capacities and ultimately put humankind’s survival at risk. Mr. Roberts reminds us that, during the Earth’s more than four-billion-year history, there have been at least five mass extinctions, including an episode of global warming 65 million years ago that killed off the dinosaurs. He believes that we are likely to be heading toward a sixth such catastrophe. This one would differ dramatically from the others both because those who caused it—us—would also be victims, and because the disaster might be avoidable. Mr. Roberts is particularly worried about the possibility of another bout of global warming.
While some say it is not absolutely clear that the current warming trend is a real threat or that it is man-caused, there can be no such doubt about the destruction of ocean life. The traditional belief that the seas are so large as to be impervious to human effects is long gone. The specific problems are mostly familiar: industrial pollution and fertilizer runoffs, the destruction of wetlands and river deltas, rising sea temperatures, and of course too much fishing. Technological advancements have made it possible to scoop up fish far faster than they can reproduce. “Our planetary remodeling did not stop at the shore,” Mr. Roberts writes. “It just came a little later to the sea.”

Okay, so it’s not a very uplifting read, but what did you expect? These are hard times for the oceans. And to the extent the book delivers such a dire prognosis, it is a very helpful reminder that the scale of mitigation we tend to talk about when we talk about addressing climate change and the fate of the oceans is completely inconsistent with the scale of the problem.

We need to amp it up by a couple of orders of magnitude, folks, when it comes to changing the way we live and changing our economies. So thanks, Mr. Roberts, for helping make that clear because so far not that many people seem to be paying attention.

Garbage On The Garbage Patch

Here’s a classic example of a completely failed, even fraudulent, attempt at counterintuitive journalism, courtesy of Gawker: “Lies You’ve Been Told About The Pacific Garbage Patch.”

Hmm, how do the editors deliver on that eyeball-grabbing, page-view-seeking, “lies” headline? Well, the easiest way, it seems, is to create a series of straw men, then knock them down and call them “lies.”

Like: this picture was not actually taken in the middle of the Pacific. Wow, really?

And: there is not actually a solid island of garbage in the Pacific, just an area with lots and lots of pieces of plastic. Phew, glad we got that straight.

And: all that plastic is not killing every marine species out there, just some. Thanks, that’s a relief.

Despite such distractions–denial-mongering in search of chump change–the real news rolls on:

(CNN) — A marine expedition of environmentalists has confirmed the bad news it feared — the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” extends even further than previously known.

Organized by two non-profit groups — the Algalita Marine Research Foundation and the 5 Gyres Institute — the expedition is sailing from the Marshall Islands to Japan through a “synthetic soup” of plastic in the North Pacific Ocean on a 72-feet yacht called the Sea Dragon, provided by Pangaea Exploration…

[snip]…Leading the expedition is Marcus Eriksen, a former U.S. marine and Ph.D student from University of Southern California. “We’ve been finding lots of micro plastics, all the size of a grain of rice or a small marble,” Eriksen said via satellite phone. “We drag our nets and come up with a small handful, like confetti — 10, 20, 30 fragments at a time. That’s how it’s been, every trawl we’ve done for the last thousand miles.”

Eriksen, who has sailed through all five gyres, said this confirmed for him “that the world’s oceans are ‘plasticized.’ Everywhere you go in the ocean, you’re going to find this plastic waste.”

“Will someone please be sure to mail my carcass to Gawker?”

Our Wave, Human Dudes

This photo doesn’t need much in the way of explanation. But it does make you wonder whether dolphins experience joy or exhilaration. Nice to think so.

(via)

Fish Fry

People sometimes ask me whether I eat fish, and when I tell them I don’t they want to know why. My stock answer is that I doubt that any fish are being fished sustainably, or farmed in a way that is net neutral when it comes to the environment and health.

Yes, there are fish guides that supposedly tell you what fish species are “safe” to eat. But then you see gross data, like that contained in this WWF Living Planet Report, which show an unrelenting, and appalling, human devastation of global fish stocks. Against that backdrop, it is simply hard for me to believe that anyone who cares about the future of fish and the oceans should do anything other than stop contributing to the insatiable demand for fish protein that is strip mining the seas. Against that backdrop, it makes sense to be overcautious, to not place our faith in subjective and imprecise assertions that some fish are doing fine. In other words, it makes sense to give fish everywhere a break.

Here’s a graphic from the WWF report, which says it all:

Yep. that’s a lot of red. And it’s not like it doesn’t follow many warnings that humanity’s estimations of “sustainable” fishing are pure fantasy. Here’s one of the best, which is in fact the analysis that prompted me to stop eating any and all fish.

Anyhow, this is the Washington Post‘s take on what has been happening:

Between 1950 and 2006, the WWF report notes, the world’s annual fishing haul more than quadrupled, from 19 million tons to 87 million tons. New technology — from deep-sea trawling to long-lining — has helped the fishing industry harvest areas that were once inaccessible. But the growth of intensive fishing also means that larger and larger swaths of the ocean are in danger of being depleted….

[snip]…Indeed, there’s some evidence that we’ve already hit “peak fish.” World fish production seems to have reached its zenith back in the 1980s, when the global catch was higher than it is today. And, according to one recent study in the journal Science, commercial fish stocks are on pace for total “collapse” by 2048 — meaning that they’ll produce less than 10 percent of their peak catch. On the other hand, many of those fish-depleted areas will be overrun by jellyfish, which is good news for anyone who enjoys a good blob sandwich.

This interactive graphic from the WWF report shows the overall population trends over the past few decades (hint: it doesn’t look very good). But we knew that already. The question is: what are you going to do about it? And what are you going to put on your plate?

Bye-Bye Baggie

There are many reasons to love Hawaii, but the latest is that it just became the first state in the Union to pass a ban on plastic bags (this is also one more reason to love the Surfrider Foundation, which pushed hard for the ban).

Plastic, and especially plastic bags, is choking the world’s oceans and waterways. So it is nice to see a very direct solution–a ban–instead of a 5 cent tax or some other half measure which doesn’t really get to the root of the problem. Maybe other states will follow Hawaii’s lead when they discover shopping without plastic bags does not in fact cause a catastrophe.

And, of course, I can’t write about plastic bags without posting my all-time favorite plastic bag video, featuring the genius of Werner Herzog:

Sharks Are The Modern Equivalent Of Bison

Anyone who is paying any attention at all knows that sharks are in trouble. But it is always helpful when science takes a hard run at establishing the facts. Here’s what a recent research effort at the University Of Hawaii came up with:

In an effort to answer the , the research team crunched data from 1607 surveys from the NOAA Coastal Reef Ecosystem Division (CRED) to calculate the effect of human habitation on shark populations. The CRED team counted sharks throughout the Pacific using towed diver surveys, the most efficient and effective way to study open ocean creatures on a large spatial scale, and compared their counts with local human population numbers. Their results were clear – and sobering.

“Around each of the heavily populated areas we surveyed — in the main Hawaiian Islands, the Mariana Archipelago and American Samoa — reef shark numbers were greatly depressed,” said Marc Nadon, lead author of the study. “We estimate that less than 10% of the baseline numbers remain in these areas.”

That 90% reduction in shark populations has long been the consensus guess on what humanity, which loves to monetize and commercialize fears of what sharks can do to us, is actually doing to sharks. So it is not surprising so much as it is a depressing indication that that catastrophic 90% number might actually be correct.

At that level, it is an echo of a similar destruction of a population for commercial benefit: the slaughter of the American buffalo. The American buffalo, or bison, was once the most numerous species of large animal on earth–until mankind saw profits in the skins and meat, and systematically reduced the herds to near extinction.

A pile of bison skulls in the 1870s, waiting to be ground into fertilizer.

There is an echo also in the cruelty involved, with shark finning easily matching, and in my view surpassing, the practice of  stampeding buffalo over a cliff for calculated barbarity.

Shark fins drying.

There is one difference, though, between the human slaughter of sharks and the human slaughter of buffalo. The meat and skins of buffalo were arguably more vital to human existence than any product the shark slaughter provides. That is not to justify or excuse the slaughter of the buffalo. It is only to say that the destruction of shark populations for soup, crank cancer treatments and the pathetic hope for more sexual prowess (particularly given the importance of sharks to the overall oceanic ecosystem) is particularly senseless and a cosmic crime against the planet.

Exploiting An Ice-Free Arctic Ocean

Among the many disappointing truisms of human history: if there is a way to commercialize nature, nature will be commercialized.

That’s a dynamic that thousands of scientists are trying to stop, at least when it comes to industrial fishing in the Arctic Ocean. As global warming slowly pushes back, and even eliminates, the summer ice cover, it is opening up pristine waters and fish stocks that are barely understood to fleets of fishing boats that are eager for new fishing grounds.

In an effort to preempt the inevitable gold rush, the scientific community is pleading for caution:

Thousands of scientists from 67 countries have called for an international agreement to close the Arctic high seas to commercial fishing until research reveals more about the freshly exposed waters.

Recent Arctic sea-ice retreat during the summer months has opened up some of the waters that fall outside of the exclusive economic zones of the nations that circle the polar ocean. In all, more than 2.8 million square kilometres make up these international waters, which some scientists say could be ice free during summer months within 10–15 years. Although industrial fishing hasn’t yet occurred in the northernmost part of the Arctic, the lack of regulation may make it an appealing target for international commercial-fishing vessels.

“The science community currently does not have sufficient biological information to understand the presence, abundance, structure, movements, and health of fish stocks and the role they play in the broader ecosystem of the central Arctic Ocean,” says the letter, which was released by the Pew Environment Group on Sunday on the eve of the opening of the International Polar Year 2012 scientific conference in Montreal, Canada. More than 2,000 scientists, including 1,328 from Arctic coastal countries, signed the letter.

Keep an eye on this. It will be a good indicator of whether we have the capacity to learn and change, and elevate conservation and science to balance pure commercialism. But if you take any bets on it, make sure you are offered some serious odds.