Losing Track

When I posted about the top shifting baselines stories of 2007, including the story on smaller Euro series spearguns (to shoot smaller fish), one kind reader wrote to me asking if I'd heard how, in 1996, the International Underwater Spearfishing Association reset world records, creating 20th century records and a new 21st century category. I had not. And I'm floored. The world record reset is likely a result of most fish getting smaller and changes in species for which hunting is encouraged. Here is a quote from the IUSA: As part of the reorganization, the Board of Directors had to address…
...make that baselines. Check out these stories from the last week alone. A perennial favorite: high hopes for hagfish Fishermen on Canada's East Coast are now considering harvesting hagfish and sea cucumber. Once the center of the cod industry, East Coast fishermen have already turned to sea urchin, toad crab and rock crab in the wake of overfishing and the cod's collapse. Now they have high hopes for hagfish. The best line in the article comes from Scott Grant, a fisheries biologist in St. John's with the Marine Institute at Memorial University who has helped develop the new harvests…
Somewhere in China right now, there's a cannonball jellyfish from the waters off Panama City just waiting to be eaten. Jellyfish make for great story ledes, don't they? The article continues: Shrimpers trying to stay afloat during the off season have been scooping them out of the gulf by the thousands since September. The gelatinous masses have turned out to be a profitable commodity on the Asian market, once they are processed into crispy protein wafers. "Cannonball is a whole new business to us," said 68-year-old shrimp boat operator Steve Davis. "We used to run from them when we were…
2007 was The Year of Climate Change. Scales were tipped, talks were commenced, and global warming became the new culprit of...everything. (Wait, didn't this happen in the 1980s?) I suppose the excuse of 9/11 was wearing thin. Plus, it was very hard to blame 9/11 for declining fish stocks. In this article from the Oakland Tribune, there are some obvious problems with Senegal's fisheries: "In my childhood, say 10 years ago, fisherman didn't have to go too far to get fish. But now (we) have to go as far as Guinea-Bissau or to some neighboring countries to get fish," said Ba [a fisherman], 25…
Jared Diamond has a great Op-Ed in the New York Times today comparing consumption between the developed and developing world. Thirty-two times. That's how many more resources we consume (the one billion people in developed countries) than the 5.5 billion people in developing nations. Gross, huh? But Diamond says giving some stuff up (and a lot of it is just nondescript stuff) shouldn't make us nervous. Real sacrifice wouldn't be required, however, because living standards are not tightly coupled to consumption rates. Much American consumption is wasteful and contributes little or nothing…
The book The Unnatural History of the Sea by Callum Roberts, a marine ecologist at the University of York in England, is the 2007 shifting baseline story of the year. Roberts pulls together the best historical studies of fisheries, photos, and woebegone descriptions of former marine abundance. A whole chapter is dedicated to the shifting baselines concept but the entire book echoes the syndrome (read more at the book's website). Included are accounts of a 24-square foot halibut, the great profusion of sharks in the eastern Pacific, and why the year 1900 is a bad baseline for the North Sea…
Happy New Year's Eve!!! I will announce the grand prize winner for the shifting baselines story of the year tomorrow (something to look forward to in 2008). Today, I give you the runners-up: 1st place: The story from the New York Times on the new Euro series speargun that was introduced in the U.S. to hunt smaller fish. Americans are known for hunting big fish (because we had some) with bulky spearguns. But lately there seems to be a growing vogue among American speardivers for smaller fish like croakers and snappers... 2nd place: In her talk at UBC on Nov. 8, Alana Mitchell, who is writing…
Hundreds of beach-going Brazilians were stung by a smack of jellyfish yesterday. "Authorities blamed an extreme heat wave over the southeastern region." Jellyfish smacks and stings: the Christmas gift that keeps on giving (thanks J.R.).
The New York Times ran a great article today: As Cars Hit More Animals on Roads, Toll Rises. Wildlife-related crashes are a growing problem on rural roads around the country. The accidents increased 50 percent from 1990 to 2004, based on the most recent federal data, according to the Western Transportation Institute at Montana State University here. The basic problem is that rural roads are being traveled by more and more people, many of them living in far-flung subdivisions. Each year, about 200 people are killed in as many as two million wildlife-related crashes at a cost of more than $8…
Archeological records show that outrigger canoes have been used in Fiji since at least the early 1800s but perhaps as early as the 1440s. It's possible that they have been around even longer. In this photo (ca. 1880), the Camakau, or traditional Fijian canoe, is in full sail. Such canoes were commonly seen in the outer islands in the Fiji group. But boat-building, at least in the canoe sense, is an endangered profession here in Fiji. According to Leon Zann's 1980 publication, Traditional and Introduced Fishing Boats in the South Pacific: Rafts and crude dugouts are still used on some…
You can't have commercial fisheries in Chesapeake Bay, and eat your oysters too. That's the thesis of Angus Phillip's excellent article in the Washington Post on how Chesapeake's Oyster Population Has Reached Rock Bottom. [Phillips] asked about the Chesapeake Bay Agreement of 2000, which set a goal of increasing the oyster population in the bay tenfold over a baseline of 1994 by the year 2010. How was that going? Seven years into the effort, "There's less oysters in the bay than we had then, according to the Department of Natural Resource's own biomass data," Baynard said. "We're going…
Earlier this year supermarkets removed monkfish from their menus admist concerns about depleted populations. Now, thanks to shifting baselines, monkfish is not overfished after all. According to an article at Seafood.com News published on Friday: A new monkfish stock assessment has concluded that the resource in both the Northern and Southern Fishery Management Areas is not overfished and overfishing is not occurring. The conclusion completely reverses the scientific community's previous understanding about monkfish, which until now was considered to be overfished and in significant need of…
Warmer waters bring wads of jellies. Global warming seems to be nurturing a worldwide explosion of jellyfish, not only allowing greater numbers of jellies to survive through the winter but also heating up north Atlantic waters where conditions are becoming favorable for Mediterranean jellyfish to thrive. Recall the smack that killed all 100,000 fish in an Irish Sea salmon farm. If you have a New Scientist subscription, read more here.
An excerpt from a 1933 article in the journal Nature--imagine seeing a passage like this today: In the spring of 1933, while Mr. Vincent Astor of New York was cruising among the Galapagos Islands, a specimen of this huge fish was seen and captured...It was swimming at the surface but sounded immediately when harpooned. For an hour and half it towed the launch, weighing about three tons at varying speeds (at times as great as six knots) and mostly in circles. Then it came to the surface and swam about sluggishly for about two and half hours before it succumbed to repeated harpoonings and a…
And just in case there are some of there out there who agree with the statement from Wikipedia: "There is very little reason or evidence to suppose that Jellyfish even require a collective noun." This important article, Invasion of Jellyfish Envelops Japan in Ocean of Slime in yesterday's Wall Street Journal removes all doubt. The Japanese government last year counted about 50,000 incidents of jellyfish trouble. So the Japanese are trying to make the best of it. Dr. Daniel Pauly has been talking about a future of jellyfish bugers since the late 1990s, but did not foresee jellyfish-…
To eBook or not to eBook? That is the question. I am particularly curious how authors feel about eBooks. Recall the singers' rebellion (revolution?) against Napster and other music sites, despite the fact that singers make most of their money off performing. Could the eBook jeopardize the writer's livelihood? Here are some other pros and cons of eBooks summarized from the comments on last week's Kindle post.
That's smuck, not schmuck. And it's the official term for a swarm of jellyfish, according to Jonathan in the last jellyfish post. The name was just created in 2000 (the need for a name for a swarm of jellyfish, just another shifting baseline). Apparently, after wiping out Northern Ireland's only salmon farm, the smuck has now moved on to Scotland.
In what was probably the largest Thanksgiving feast this week, a swarm of billions of jellyfish attacked a salmon farm in Northern Ireland yesterday and ate $2 million worth of fish. Jellyfish and slime are taking over the oceans, just as Dr. Jeremy Jackson always warns. Billions of jellyfish feasting on more than 100,000 salmon, just another shifting baseline.
If you stop by Amazon, you'll see Jeff Bezos has launched their latest product: Kindle. Jeff promises that "reading on Kindle is nothing like reading on a computer screen." Weighing in at less than a paperback (but costing much more: $399) and with room for 200 novels, Kindle (and the other many 'electronic paper' systems of its kind) is probably the future for reading. I remember the discussion long ago that J.K. Rowling could have single-handedly launched e-books if she had chosen to only release her Harry Potter electronically. My young neighbors were less than fond of the idea. Even…
Chuck Hesse wrote to the Tallahassee Democrat this past weekend about shifting baselines and Wakulla Springs, FL. Here is what he wrote: Shifting baselines erase natural beauty Each individual has a baseline, or initial image, which is set the first time an area is seen; so your first visit to Wakulla springs, your first trip to the woods, your first fishing trip to the gulf, etc. sets your personal baseline. As time passes small changes occur. These small changes are usually accepted as the cost of progress or for the good of the community. However, when changes are accumulated over time…