Shifting Baselines

Dolphin Stampede

Category: Ocean View

Check out this video shot in the Sea of Cortez a friend from the Surfrider Foundation sent along. It is a great reminder of the magnificent life that still exists in the ocean. But can you imagine what it was like 200 years ago?

Posted by Jennifer L. Jacquet at 10:47 AM • 3 Comments

Shifting Glaciers

Category: Losing Track

Check out this magnificent and convincing collection panoramic photographs of receding glaciers over the decades...

Posted by Jennifer L. Jacquet at 10:38 AM • 1 Comments

Baby You Can Have What Invert You Like...

Category: Communicating

When Oppenheimer watched the atomic bomb go off he felt he had played a part in the destruction of humanity. I know the feeling.

Last week I got a nice email from a group of graduate students in marine ecology at Northeastern University who apparently are losing their minds as badly as I did in the early 90s. They sent me links to these two videos which they said were inspired by my early Prairie Starfish videos (particularly Barnacles Tell No Lies I'm guessing). But these folks have taken it to "a ho nuva leva." They've figured out ways to rap about everything from trochophores to veligers, tell slug haters to be quiet, and extoll the virtues of forming a brown body when times are rough (if you're a bryozoan). And they also explain how to Drop your Box on the Rocks.

I give their work an "FA" (Frickin' Awesome).

Clearly the time is coming for an Invertebrate Film Festival, with a special prize for Best Tardigrade Short.

Posted by Randy Olson at 12:35 AM • 8 Comments

Jellyfish and Bacteria

Category: Losing Track

...That's what you get when the ocean is infer-e-yah.

We sang about it six years ago. In 2002 we made a Flash video in which we said, "A new term for the new millennium:  Jellyfish blooms." And now our dire predictions appear to be coming true, around the world.

They'll sting your knees, and cause disease.

Posted by Randy Olson at 12:26 AM • 3 Comments

Half a Million Sharks Finned Each Year in Ecuador

Category: Losing Track

I am the lead author of a new study In Hot Soup: Sharks Captured in Ecuador's Waters out in the journal Environmental Sciences. We reconstructed the shark landings for Ecuador from 1976 to 2004 and demonstrated that Ecuador captures more than 3.5 times the number of sharks they officially report catching--or about half a million sharks each year.

The shark fishery of Ecuador is one of many around the world that feeds the growing Asian demand for sharkfin soup. Fishermen catch more than 40 different shark species and one need only visit a few of the fishing ports along the coast to see shark finning in full effect (such as these juvenile hammerheads captured off Santa Rosa).

Yet, until the 2005 update of fisheries data, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) did not report elasmobranches for Ecuador, indicating that the Ecuadorian government failed to report on these species, probably in part due to the scandalous nature of the shark fin industry.

Our study reconstructed Ecuador's mainland shark landings from the bottom up from 1979 to 2004 using gray literature and shark fin export data. Over this period, shark landings for the Ecuadorian mainland were an estimated 7000 tonnes per year, or nearly half a million sharks. Reconstructed shark landings were about 3.6 times greater than those retroactively reported by FAO from 1991 to 2004.

The discrepancies in data require the urgent implementation of the measures Ecuadorian law mandates: eliminating targeted shark captures, finning, and transshipments, as well as adoption of measures to minimize incidental capture. Most of all, a serious shark landings monitoring system and effective chain of custody standards are needed.

Posted by Jennifer L. Jacquet at 3:05 PM • 2 Comments

Are the Moray Eels of Bonaire Really Dying?

Category: Losing Track

This is rather distressing. It doesn't sound like there has been any sort of major, published, peer-reviewed, quantitative documentation of this yet. But that said, something is not right when so many sport divers not only count dozens of dead or dying eels (the diver on this blog itemized in detail 50 encounters with dead eels), but even post video footage of one writhing in what looks to be the death throes.

In all the thousands of hours I've logged diving on Caribbean coral reefs I've never once seen a dead or dying eel. It's a rather disturbing mystery for now.

Posted by Randy Olson at 10:12 AM • 7 Comments

Fish Stocks: All Fall Down?

Category: Ocean Politics

Everywhere I turn it seems to be bad news for poster fish species. Bluefin tuna are in a bad way. And let's not forget pollock, the world's largest food fishery. This year, conservation groups and scientists feel the catch limits are being set anywhere from two to three times too high. Greenpeace has gone so far as to release a television public service announcement in Seattle and Anchorage last week to call attention to the problem with pollock...

Posted by Jennifer L. Jacquet at 10:00 AM • 0 Comments

What Can We Learn from Cockroaches of the Sea?

Category: Ocean View

In my Topics in Marine Science class that I teach at Western Washington University, we spend a week on marine mammals and a portion of that time talking about whaling. We discuss the use of whale oil for illuminants, the 1930s as the Whaling Olympic era, the devastation of certain whale populations, and the formation of the International Whaling Commission (IWC). We examine the shift in values as a world that was largely pro-whaling became largely anti-whaling and how science (e.g., the discovery of whale song) and conservation (e.g., Greenpeace) played a role in that ethical shift.

I ask my students to examine this graph, which tells the sad story of the fate of the southern hemisphere blue whale. The maroon bars are historical whaling hunts and the blue line is an estimate of former blue whale abundance based on a population models by Line Christensen, formerly of the UBC Fisheries Centre. The current southern blue whale population is less than 5% of the population pre-whaling.

I ask the students if we can generalize from this trend. I present genetic research, such as the study in Science by Roman & Palumbi, which used mitochondrial DNA to reconstruct former population sizes and confirms that many whale populations are mere crumbs compared to times past. I show them similar graphs for North Atlantic humpback and Northwest Pacific gray whales and they quickly realize that the blue whale's fate is not unique.

Then I show my students a similar graph for North Atlantic minke whales, which have also been called the "cockroaches of the sea" by one Japanese official.

And I ask them to explain why we don't want to whale minke whales. They look at the graph and they give insightful responses such as: "maybe the minke population was much higher in the time before the start of the x-axis" (and, since we have also discussed shifting baselines, this is a plausible and intelligent explanation, but is not the reason); or, "maybe the population decrease in the 1950s and '60s made managers nervous"; or, "maybe it's because minke whales are small and it is better to catch big whales".

Actually, the minke whale population is fairly stable and appears to be a rather good example of sustainability (i.e., things stay the same). So why is the international community largely opposed to killing them? Finally, some shy student will suggest that maybe we don't think killing them is right.

Bingo.

The numbers do not justify why many people (I dare say most) are opposed to killing minke whales. The ethics do. We came to believe that minke whales have the right to live. This sentiment lies outside the boundaries of science.

I am so thankful for the minke example. And I believe my students are, too.

Some scientists are hesitant to discuss ethics (let alone promote their own). As one top scientist recently wrote to me when I proposed to work on a new policy paper together:

I have a very firm personal policy not to put my name on papers or editorials that promote or favour any particular set of values or preferences, and your outline clearly is an attempt to promote conservation values and risk averse policies.

I understand how one's beliefs can endanger one's science (take, for instance, the fortunately now unpopular field of eugenics) and how ethical lines can be hazy (as can be the case in the eradication of invasive species). But I also believe in teaching my students about how ethics can trump science in the same way that corrupt politics or corporate greed can.

And I believe the wider one's ethical umbrella, the better (even if I can also occasionally find vegans who espouse all their particularities annoying).

Eventually, I hope an ethical principle similar to the one for whales can extend to other members of the marine world, as does Carl Safina with his promotion of a sea ethic. And I look forward to the day when we think about fish as more than simply seafood, just as we came to respect the lives of whales--even those considered to be the cockroaches of the sea.

As Daniel Pauly and I wrote in our first paper together:

When whales were on the brink of extinction, the primary avenue of protection was not a campaign in opposition to using whale oil or against eating whales. Whaling ceased after the emergence and wide public acceptance of a 'whale mythology', which de-commodified them. The moratorium on whaling, ratified by the International Whaling Commission (IWC), was a direct result of the revulsion toward whaling felt through most of the Western world. It is only when a similar revulsion is felt by the public about the wholesale destruction of fish populations and marine ecosystems that we can hope to save them from our management and our appetite.

Posted by Jennifer L. Jacquet at 2:53 PM • 29 Comments

Two People Who Understand the Power of Television in America

Category: Communicating

This is how it's done in this country.

Posted by Randy Olson at 8:06 AM • 9 Comments