Though the Bluefin is a special fish, its problems are just one instructive example of how management can go off the tracks if the scientific part of the process is corruptible by short-term economics and political lobbying.  We call for a five-year moratorium on possession of Bluefin tuna throughout the western Altantic and the closure of Gulf of Mexico spawning areas to all gear capable of catching Bluefin tuna during Bluefin spawning season. 

See:  http://blueocean.org/pdfs/BluefinCollapse.pdf

To Pemba

Our commercial flight got us as far as the island of Unguja.  A charter flight took us the last leg of our trip, to Pemba Island.  We’re off the coast of Tanzania, East Africa.  Collectively called Zanzibar, these islands are part of the “Swahili Coast.”  The mainly Muslim sub-culture here has been deeply influenced by centuries of ocean-going sailing trade with Arabs.  We’re filming the second and final shoot of the pilot for our planned TV series, OCEAN, and here’s the angle:  We’ll profile a new local effort by Islamic leaders to instill a conservation ethic in the residents and religious leaders of Pemba Island’s fishing villages.

Our film crew consists of British-born director John Angier; Dutch-born cameraman Peter Hoving; Italian underwater camerawoman Valentina Cucchiara, who comes via her home on the Egyptian Red Sea; Kenyan sound man Hassan Ali Gharalla; and the kid from Brooklyn:  me. 

This a culture straddling several centuries at once.  Electricity, for instance, is a sometime thing.  Power outages are daily, but many villages would never know—they don’t have electric lines.  Or plumbing.  Many houses are mud and thatch.

Our base is the town of Chake-Chake (pronounced cha’-kay cha’-kay).  Our visit has been arranged with the help of CARE and the Misali Island Conservation Association, an improbable little local group that formed to wage a successful fight against a planned tourist development on Misali Island.  Fishers feared they’d lose access to the surrounding waters and that the intended resort would also cut the locals out of any tourism revenue.  And as one local leader said, “We are concerned tourism will bring people who will leave garbage, and break corals.”

Going Coastal

Around Pemba Island, tides range widely.  At low tide many boats simply careen on the flats, stranded till the tide returns.  The boats, all wooden, are called dhows.  They have one mast, one boom, and one triangular sail.  The boom is  hoisted to the top of the mast, then angled at about 45 degrees.  The sails assume a perfect shape and fill without luffing, even in the merest breeze.  They look like they were built centuries ago; indeed, their design has probably changed little in thousands of years. 

Many smaller dhows—mostly just dugout canoes fitted with mast and sail—work local waters.  Much larger ones carry cargo along the coast.  Fish are kept without ice, displayed without ice, sold without ice, and presumably, eaten quickly.

The people, heavily dependent on the sea for their livelihoods, catch various fishes, cephalopods (squids and their relatives), sea cucumbers, and snails, and collect seaweed.  They use traps, nets and spears.

Some very healthy coral reefs remain.  (Several dive operators provide good access for tourists seeking views of fine coral and dense fish populations.)

The island of Misali lies on the horizon.  Misali’s mystique derives from its legend.  Story has it that in the past a prophet visited.  When it came time to pray, his companion worried that they had no proper prayer mat.  “The island will be our mat,” the prophet replied.  And so the place, named after the Swahili word for “mat,” became imbued with a sense of holy presence.  In addition, from the local villages it lies on the horizon in the direction of Mecca, deepening the religious overtone.

Extensive flats wreath the island in a turquoise halo.  Men hunt octopus hiding in patchy corals in the sparkling water.  Their gear is simply a mask and a hook on the end of a stick. 

An area closed to fishing by the government, a little over a square kilometer, protects some of the island’s best coral.  Outside that zone, fishing is allowed.  But fishing with explosives or poisons, spear guns (the crudely homemade guns shoot their spear using simple rubber slings), and haul-seine nets are banned.  The emphasis is on preserving the coral, which is home to rainbowed fishes on which the people’s survival depends.   

But this is an impoverished, imperiled paradise.  At the village of Kichenjani, I join two barefoot fishers, Musser Khalfan (age 22) and Nassor Sleman (a hard-weathered 45 years old).  Using hand-carved paddles we pull seaward, then hoist the old, tattered sail.

Nassor complains that as a young man he caught more fish.  There are now too many fishermen, too many traps and nets all through this area—he gestures with his hand.  Nearly 40 nearby villages send boats to fish the area.  And more come from distant locales where they have already depleted their own waters. 

He complains—and this surprises me—that the area closed to fishing is too small.  He says fishermen need many more such areas closed to fishing—because the closed areas produce the fish. 

“Everyone is fishing here,” he complains.  “Everyone is coming to pressurize this area because the closed zone gives us fish.”  He wants closed areas established in more places, so competing fishermen will have enough fish near their own villages—and won’t need to come here.

Two brothers, Haji Faki Shehe and Juma Faki Shehe, in their 20s, use traps made from a frame of bent sticks covered with small-mesh wire.  The funnel-shaped trap entrance is woven from palm fronds.  They retrieve their traps with a short stick with several projecting branches and rock tied to one end—a Paleolithic grappling hook. 

Their first trap holds damselfish and butterflyfish the size of large potato chips, several small rabbitfish, a small porcupinefish, a puffer, and a lovely palm-sized cowry snail.  They’d all look nice in an aquarium.  If we caught these kinds of things back home we’d put them in a bucket of water and admire them, then set them free and go home for lunch.  Here the bucket has no water, and they are lunch.  Nothing gets thrown back. 

 Island Islam

In a round, thatch-roofed high school classroom, Mbarouk Mussa Omar, a pleasant fellow working with the Misali Island Conservation Association, draws on the blackboard for the students.  His diagram shows how sunlight helps grow corals and seaweeds, how smaller fish, then bigger fish result, and how we are part of this circle of life.  His Swahili is peppered with words like “chlorophyll” and “photosynthesis.”

He says that the Qur’an instructs that if you destroy the natural environment you will be punished; from that punishment you must learn, and do things better.  As examples he explains how the tsunami brought the worst damage where the people had cut down all the protective coastal mangrove trees and mined out the coral reefs.  Mbarouk tells them that when fishing, they must let little ones grow; they will be much bigger next time they are caught.  The students get it.

From here Mbarouk takes us to Kukuu, another fishing village.  The issue here is mangrove trees.  They can form dense ribbons of forest between the sea and shore.  In many areas mangroves are the first line of defense against flooding and storms.  But here many have been cut.  “If we cut all the mangroves,” he says, “the sea will come to our houses.”  The Qur’an teaches, he says, that if you cut a tree you must plant a tree.

And so we will.

I and about a dozen villagers who’ve been working on this project line up in an open muddy area adjacent to a nice stand of trees, and, on signal, begin planting.  Our bare feet squish pleasingly through the mud as we plant a seed, take two steps, and repeat.  When planting you simply push the lower third of the foot-long seed into the mud, leaving the remaining two-thirds standing.  So the whole area looks immediately like a new little garden.  Indeed, the group is eager to show how well seedlings of recent plantings are growing, filling in areas that had been cut-over.

By the Book

The Imam of the central mosque in Chake-Chake, Sheik Suleiman, is a tall man with quick bright eyes and a kindly bearing.  Today, he has convened about 50 Imams from around the island to meet for a couple of hours and discuss Islamic ethics and the Qur’an’s teachings as they relate to nature.

Suleiman sees a deep connection between human well-being and the environment.  For him, depletion of natural resources is linked to poverty in real, immediate, and life-threatening ways. 

He explains, “God created the world in greenness.  To protect creation is humanity’s role.  Everyone has that responsibility.” 

In time for Friday afternoon prayers, we go to the central mosque to hear Suleiman’s sermon about Islam’s environmental ethic.  Global warming is one of the main topics in his sermon.  There is no conflict between science and Islam, he explains.  He speaks energetically without notes for 40 minutes, delivering his teaching.  Afterwards, Suleiman explains to me, “In a Muslim country, the message can be given through the Islamic perspective.  But it is a message for all religions, for all people.”

The final planned activity of the day is a ceremony wherein Fazlun Khalid of the Birmingham (England)-based Islamic Foundation for Ecology and Environmental Sciences will bestow upon the community a brand-new booklet, “Teachers Guide Book for Islamic Environmental Education.”  The booklet uses six Islamic themes and numerous verses, and explains their implications for environmental ethics.  The themes are Tawhid, the principle of unity, the nature of the Creator, and the importance of his Creation; Khalq, every single thing we see around us—the environment and ourselves; Mizan, the principle of balance on which all creation works; Insan, the purpose of humankind; Fasad, the human capacity for corruption, mischief, and destructiveness; Khalifa, our obligation as God’s steward on Earth and guardian of His creation.  It’s printed both in English and Swahili versions, and Fazlun’s brought plenty of copies. 

Several hundred people gather outside a school under the shade of an immense mango tree.  Musicians play drums and tambourines.  Girls—despite being seated in formal assembly and Muslim dress—cannot keep their bodies from dancing in place to the rhythms.  Several men in fine robes are performing a traditional dance.

Tables and chairs are set for about two-dozen local dignitaries.  The color, sound, and setting make it a picturesque pageant, indeed.  The actual presentation is formal and rather solemn.  The closing speech comes from the Mufti, a high-ranking religious leader, who reinforces the importance of conserving the natural environment.  As the crowd begins slowly to disperse, the teachers try herding students back toward the school, but the girls keep asking the drummers to play so they can dance—and the drummers keep obliging.  The Mufti expresses to me his personal approval and appreciation of this project, the booklet, and our visit.

“You have seen with your own eyes,” he says.  “Through the Qur’an, through the Bible, we welcome in this effort all religions, all people.”

Outgoing Fisheries Service director William T. Hogarth writes in The Washington Post on December 29 (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/28/AR2007122802570.html?sub=AR) that his agency “has followed recommendations from top scientists for managing the bluefin tuna.”

Not so.  Since 1982, when scientists recommended a “near-zero” quota, fisheries managers in his agency and internationally have often set much higher quotas than scientists have recommended.  His agency ignores many top scientists consistently calling for reduced quotas and closed spawning areas.  Bottom line:  by ignoring real science he and other managers have failed so acutely that the U.S. catch has dropped 90% inside of five years.  A very real threat of extinction now looms for one of the largest fish in the sea, while fishermen go out of business.

Yes, European countries’ fishing is out of control.  But that’s not why our fish are disappearing.  Some of the science Hogarth and his advisors are ignoring is tagging data showing that the fish originating in U.S. waters tend to stay here.  Only about 10 percent of our fish go east.  Meanwhile, many European fish come here.  That European “subsidy” means our own fish are in even sharper decline than the 90-percent drop in U.S. catch suggests.  What Hogarth calls the “few bluefin” caught in the Gulf of Mexico spawning area are the last few breeders in our population.

Hogarth’s agency insists on allowing boats to fish there because pointing fingers at Europe’s mismanagement is easier than taking action.  Letting our boats go out of business and our giant tuna go extinct is negligent management that ignores science, sense, and the law.  Dr. Hogarth is missing his opportunity to do the right thing before he leaves the agency.

For more on the beleaguered Bluefin, see http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/23/AR2007122301515.html

 Our plan is to look at coral reef protection with a focus on sharks.  We’re going to spend a little time in Belize.  First we’ll go to a fish market, then to a protected atoll called Glover’s Reef.  We’ll be filming part of a pilot for a TV series called OCEAN.

Dr. Carl Safina, right, in Belize during the filming of the pilot for OCEAN

 Three huge cruise ships stand outside Belize City.  Of the thousands of people on board, most would enjoy some locally caught fish or lobster.  Can we love the reefs without loving them to death?

 The fish market has fishermen offering jacks (mainly Horse-eye), groupers (a few), small Yellowtail snappers (lots), sharks (most very small, just pups), and a few other smallish reef fish.  The largest fish in the market is a juvenile Goliath Grouper weighing about 50 pounds (unmolested, they exceed 500 pounds).  A decade ago the market had no sharks.  Now fishermen call all sharks to market, even the oft-unloved nurse shark whose fins are worthless for soup-making.

Dr. Carl Safina, far right, observes the offerings at a Belize fishmarket.  Shark fins

fetch $40 to $50 a pound.

 Shark fins are used by the Chinese community here, and some are exported all the way to China, for making “shark. fin soup.”  The soup itself is just chicken or beef stock.  The fins add no flavor.  The cartilaginous fin-rays that stiffen the sharks’ fins are all that is of value.  They thicken the soup.  But flour makes a better thickener.  Fins fetch $40 to $50 a pound, an astronomical sum around here.  This drives the fishing, as it drives shark fishing worldwide now.

 A rather rough, rather wet, rather long ride gets us to Glover’s Reef, an ocean atoll rising from the deep seafloor 20 miles outside the barrier reef.  It’s 20 miles long and 7 miles wide with four small islands.  Middle Key, the one we’re on, hosts a scientific station managed by the New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society.  Like all atolls, it’s a ring of coral reef whose central lagoon is full of small, picturesque “patch reefs.” 

Middle Key

 The waving palms, turquoise shallows, emerald mangrove shoreline, and fringing reef appear intensely beautiful.  Outside that wave-breaking necklace of reef, the ocean plunges to indigo deep.  The seafloor, about sixty feet, is covered with big barrel sponges and soft corals waving gently in the easy-flowing current.  The place is bang-on gorgeous.  Schools of small and medium fishes are evident everywhere.

 We’re here to see what happens when a place is protected from certain kinds of fishing.  Nets are verboten on the whole atoll, and a big pie-slice section is closed to all removal of marine life.

 Dr. Janet Gibson has for nearly two decades been involved in achieving protection for Belize’s barrier reef.  Her goal is to bring 15 to 20 percent of the reef tract under total protection.  That’s about what many scientists think would be needed to give the reef resilience to fishing in the other 80 to 85 percent.  So far about one percent is fully protected.  But inside those few reserves the results are so dramatic–there are so many more conch, lobster, and big fish–that Gibson hopes to get more reserves established, at an accelerating pace.  Of course, “It’s a race against time,” Janet acknowledges.

 Here at Glover’s, Ellen Pikitch and Demian Chapman’s decade-long study of sharks on the reef is showing that the reserve is working for Nurse Sharks and Caribbean Reef Sharks. But it’s working because these sharks seldom leave the protected area.

 Around the reef, the scientists have planted receivers.  Inside the sharks, they’ve implanted transmitters.  There are quite a few sharks here, and we have no difficulty capturing several for the purpose of implanting transmitters.  Each transmitter is the diameter of a pencil and about an inch long.  It’ll go “beep” for 18 months.  Each time the shark is in range of a receiver, the beep says, “I’m here.”

Dr. Carl Safina, center, studying sharks at Glover’s Reef

 Turns out, when we look at Demian’s data, these sharks are homebodies.  Most of the time they stick to only one part of the atoll, going off to deep water during daylight, coming into the shallows at night.  The pings recorded by the receiver tell a story of individual sharks spending much of their time in quite small parts of the reef, with occasional exursions around the atoll.

 What would happen if they wandered in and out a lot?  “They’d be goners,” says Demian.  “They’d be those pups we saw in the fish market because, basically, where gillnets are allowed, they pretty quickly catch nearly all the sharks.”

 Is the difference really so stark?  We arrange to meet some fishermen about 20 miles away.  Three raggedly dressed men hail us from their small open single-engine boat.  Expecting us, they’re waiting patiently with their net.  They set it last night and it’s been in the water 10 hours.  Marked by floats, the net stretches half a kilometer.  Any swimming thing bigger than about eight inches long will have been arrested by all that mesh.

Gillnet fishermen

The head fisherman has been pulling on nets like this for three decades.  They have seen the catch go, he says, “very down.”  He blames increasing competition.  But he insists the number of fish in the water, and number being caught, remain the same as always.

 And then comes the shock:  the whole net contains not one fish.  Zero.  Ten hours, 500 yards of netting–not a single fish.  I don’t see too much competition for the same catch–I see no catch and the writing on the wall for these fishermen.  And for their children, the ink is set, and it says, “No future–unless…”

 We’ve seen the one hope for the future at Glover’s Reef:  an area where nets are banned and a smaller area where no fishing is allowed.  This is not anti-fishing; it’s just reality.  You can’t sell goods if you have only stores and no factories.  Glover’s Reef is one factory.  And these fishermen need a lot more of them.  Otherwise, we can kiss the fish and the fishermen, goodbye.

 But with some of area set aside, the reefs and their fish could survive.  If we let fish recover, we let fishing thrive.  We’ve glimpsed two versions of the future.  They’re ours to choose.

The story goes like this: It’s one of the largest, fastest, most gorgeous fish in the sea. Unfortunately, its extraordinary warm-bloodedness makes its muscle delicious to the strange seafood-loving creatures that live on land. The value of bluefin tuna meat goes up due to global demand for sushi and sashimi. As the price goes up, fishing increases. Too many fish are caught and the population collapses. Over the past 50 years bluefin fisheries have collapsed off Brazil, in the North Sea, and recently off the eastern U.S. and Canada.

The Commission tasked with managing Atlantic bluefin fisheries is completely broken. The 43-nation International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas met this month in, appropriately enough, Turkey, to discuss the fate of bluefin tuna in the Atlantic. Usually referred to by its acronym ICCAT-pronounced eye-cat- it should be called instead ICCAN’T. Or, keep the acronym and change its name to International Conspiracy to Catch All Tuna.

If that’s mildly amusing the Commission itself is the real joke. It’s stocked with ponderous self-important, cynical men who move and think like escargot. Their only concern, like most people, is money and politics. But because they’re bureaucrats not businessmen, these people are so short-sighted and dim-witted that they fail at both.

The same can be said for the fishers themselves, who, when it comes to bluefin tuna are represented by ideologues incapable of understanding that collapse is bad for business. They lobby the Commissioners very hard, and on the other end Japan, the main market for bluefin, does everything possible to keep quotas high and the science be damned.

So the Commission itself is an odd cross between a fishermen’s pit-bull and Japanese lap-dog. Last year, U.S. fishermen caught only 10 percent of their quota. By any measure, they’re going out of business. Because they consistently refused to discuss cutting their quota for the sake of conservation and their own future, their greed is bankrupting them. What have they and the Commissioners learned from the collapses? Apparently, nothing at all. In fact, in their 40-year history, they have never once managed a fish population sustainably or allowed a recovery. All the fish species under their “authority” are at historic lows, with one exception: North Atlantic Swordfish. But it took a chef’s boycott and a successful lawsuit to arrest and turn around that fish’s plummet.

The largest remaining Atlantic bluefin population-which breeds in the Mediterranean-is now also endangered with collapse. The quota for fishing in the eastern half of the Atlantic and in the Med is more than double what the Commission’s own scientists recommend. Moreover, recent catches have exceeded the limit by more than 50%. Actual catches are about 230% higher than scientists recommend, meaning that for every one fish that can be sustainably caught, fishermen are killing more than three. The population has halved since the 1970’s, with most of the decline occurring in the last 5-6 years. It’s the familiar Bluefin story: Illegal fishing is rampant, too many fish are being caught, and the population is headed for collapse.

At the recent Commission meeting the United States and Canada proposed a 3-year moratorium on bluefin fishing for eastern Atlantic fishing countries-i.e. exempting themselves-to allow member nations time to control illegal fishing and incorporate scientific recommendations. The proposal was quickly rejected. Despite obvious overfishing and decline, Commission delegates actually raised the quota slightly.

Nothing meaningful-at least nothing good-is ever done for bluefin tuna by ICCAN’T. Nevermind that the Commission’s own scientists have found that reducing catches and rebuilding the population could lead to substantially higher quotas in as few as 10 years.

Archeological evidence shows that people have been fishing bluefin tuna in the Mediterranean for at least 9,000 years. A three year break is not too much to ask to ensure that bluefin are around for the next 9,000.

As Andy Revkin reports in the New York Times, even though whale meat is unpopular in Japan, government officials have decided to expand their whale-hunting. This year they will kill 1,400 whales, and a new species will be openly on the menu: endangered Humpback Whales. Read his excellent article for the facts at: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/25/weekinreview/25revkin.html?_r=1&ref=science&oref=slogin.

He notes, “The official line is that whales are no more intelligent or special than cows, their expanding numbers are depleting fisheries needed by humans, and any complaints about killing them are hypocritical and little more than cultural imperialism.”

Here they go again.

As the United States is the most irresponsible country in terms of energy waste and denial about global warming, Japan is the world’s worst country in its zeal to kill and consume wild nature. Japan is a major force in forest depletion worldwide because they are a major market for old-growth wood. Much of what used to be the ancient forests of the Pacific Northwest of North America was exported to Japan as raw logs, where it was used wastefully to make throw-away concrete pouring molds for buildings.

Japan is the world’s driver of fishing for giant bluefin tuna, as well as setting quotas for bluefin tuna globally. Because of Japan, the giant tuna are depleted in all oceans, and Japan has been convicted in world court of intentionally overfishing its already-too-high, largely self-set quotas, and trying to hide it. A country where an endangered 700-pound fish can be auctioned wholesale for $174,000 is a country crazed. It is insane (or just dishonest) for Japan to suggest that whales are depleting fish supplies needed by humans because Japan’s global overfishing has probably done more to deplete fish supplies needed by humans than has any other single country.

Japan insists on killing whales and that the kill is sustainable. The main problem is: they lie. DNA tests of whale meat in Japan showed protected species labeled as minke whale, the only species Japan announced it would hunt. So the hunt is corrupt and the official line demonstrably unreliable.

Second, most large whales worldwide remain at extremely depressed numbers compared to their original population sizes. Whaling did that to them.

Third, there is no humane way to kill a whale. Two main differences between whales and cows are that cows can be killed humanely and cows are raised for the purpose so their numbers are not an issue. Cows are not endangered by hunting; whales are. People who grow cows own them. Japan does not own these whales. They steal them from the rest of us, in defiance of the spirit and intent of the International Whaling Commission’s global whaling ban.

Finally, Japan’s insistence on killing animals no one needs to eat, animals that are the largest that have ever lived, simply shows a disrespect for life so outsized as to be utterly indecent.

The New York Times has an article about a new undertaking that plans to put iron-bearing dust into the ocean to trigger plankton blooms and thereby pull carbon dioxide out of the air.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/07/science/07ocean.html?m&ex=1194670800&en=475f8ed8e7942ecb&ei=5087%0A

Because there are so many other things we could be doing to solve the problems caused by fossil fuel dependency and energy wastefulness (auto and other efficiencies, clean decentralized diverse energies that don’t tie us to unsavory political regimes and propel us into military quagmires), I am uncomfortable with attempts to get comfortable with current energy technologies. We should be solving, not masking, the problems, in my opinion.

But the other thing that seldom seems to surface is that because most of the ocean is a nutrient “desert” most of what lives there is adapted to those conditions. I’m sure some people would want to grow forests where there’s now cactus. But we’d probably have quite a debate about the merits of desert ecosystems and the life forms that can live only in those conditions. Replacing ecosystems currently limited by iron with systems rich in iron, plankton, and a whole revised and episodic food chain seems worthy of a deeper discussion. The simple questions, ‘Would it work?’ and ‘What are the likely consequences?’ seem to call for a better level of debate.

For just one example, consider the populations of yellowfin and skipjack tuna that support major fisheries and provide food for millions of people. Those fish live in sparse, nutrient-limited clear blue water. They seldom come onto continental shelves much richer in plankton and almost never enter greenish, plankton-filled water. It seems to me that, all the energy questions aside for the moment, we should simply ask what happens to what’s living in iron-poor waters when we add iron–and whether that’s desirable and ethical.

Paul Greenberg’s New York Times op-ed on the deep depletion of bluefin tuna, that mighty last buffalo of the sea, struck a nerve. The ocean is a much lonelier place without the fall run of giant fish hundreds of pounds in weight, swimming through the ocean like speeding automobiles. And the acres of “small” tuna (under 100 pounds), were a source of high excitement every autumn  and year-long anticipation. As a wildlife experience, nothing near New York came close. As an eating experience, few things in the world came close. Now, forget it. What didn’t get eaten here got eaten in Japan, and for all practical purposes they’re gone. Last year American fishers could catch only about 10 percent of their quota, and this year the fishing is worse. The insanity of the price in Japan keeps fishing pressure high worldwide (the record wholesale price for one fish auctioned in Tokyo was over $170,000 for one fish). But most galling, our government’s fisheries service, while belatedly calling for a moratorium in the eastern half of the Atlantic, still allows boats to fish in the Gulf of Mexico while the last remaining giant fish are breeding there. They’re not allowed to keep more than one giant bluefin tuna per trip, so many get killed on the fishing gear and wasted. To other countries, that must seem hypocritical. It does to me. Those last breeding buffalo of the sea need protection immediately, and that’s something our government could do tomorrow.

Greenberg’s op-ed is at: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/04/opinion/nyregionopinions/04CIgreenberg.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

When I was writing my book “Voyage of the Turtle,” my focus was on the sumo wrestler among sea turtles, the gigantic Leatherback that can weigh a ton. But through my travels, concern about another species, the Loggerhead Turtle, also kept recurring.

Two recent publications merit attention: 1) a new five-year global review of the Loggerhead Turtle by the U.S. government, and 2) a new paper about incidental catch of Loggerheads in Pacific Baja, Mexico, by Hoyt Peckham and several academic colleagues. [see: www.fws.gov/northflorida/SeaTurtles/2007-Reviews/2007-Loggerhead-turtle-5-year-review-final.pdf AND www.plosone.org Search there for: S. Hoyt Peckham, David Maldonado Diaz, Andreas Walli, Georgita Ruiz, L.B. Crowder, and Wallace J. Nichols, Small-scale fisheries bycatch jeopardizes endangered Pacific Loggerhead turtles. PLoS ONE]

When I started going offshore frequently off Long Island in the 1980s, Loggerhead Turtles were in decline. But in the 1990s, their nesting numbers rose considerably on U.S. east coast beaches. In South Florida, for example, Loggerhead nesting populations had grown about 4 percent per year in the 1990s.

Loggerhead populations worldwide have serious problems from fisheries and beach development. The Southeast U.S., from Texas to the Carolinas and especially Florida, has one of the two largest Loggerhead nesting populations in the world. (Oman, on the Arabian peninsula, has the other major nesting area.) The U.S. population has become the most important globally because it probably has the highest remaining population and the best chance for good future management. Yet recent figures show that the Loggerhead population is declining by about 4 percent each year, erasing the gains of the 1990s. Elsewhere on the U.S. coast they’re dropping between 2 and 7 percent annually.

But does that decline really mean much? I used to think not. But now I’m getting concerned.

When I visited the Southeast U.S. in 2004, I saw plenty of Loggerheads. They were near their recent nesting peak and had just started the downturn that everyone is now talking about. In the water, in the right places, juveniles not yet old enough to breed abounded.

The analysis then was that adults were declining because their numbers reflected conditions 25 years or so earlier—when they were hatched. During those bad old days, beach protections were so poor and fisheries mortality were high for so many years that few Loggerheads survived to adulthood. This left a “hole” in the population, leading to a predictable decline in nesting numbers. According to this analysis, the problem wasn’t so much that older turtles were dying, but more that there were so few young ones from decades earlier to mature and replace them. So, the population was dropping.

But because of increased protections for nests and from fisheries, the number of juveniles in the water skyrocketed in the ‘90s. And because fisheries and beach protections were still improving in 2004, there didn’t seem much to worry about. Mandatory turtle escape (or excluder) devices were largely successful in shrimp nets.

Even where fishing boats must use turtle escape devices, shrimp nets catch and waste many unwanted fishes

Surviving juvenile turtles that were benefiting would begin maturing in ten to twenty years, filling in the ‘hole’ in the declining adult population.

Researchers release a juvenile Loggerhead off South Carolina

At least, that was the hope. I shared that hope and still do. Shrimp and longline fisheries now kill far fewer turtles than they did, and many beaches do have better protection than in the past.

Loggerhead Turtle in researcher’s net. Many still drown in some fisheries.

But what if that’s wrong? There’s at least one other possibility: the number of juveniles reflects better protection of beaches and nests, but the falling number of adult nesters indicates that the fisheries kills remain too high for the population to absorb. In other words, yes, there are a lot of juveniles, but they’re not surviving long enough to reproduce and increase the species’ population.

If that’s the case, we’ve got a problem. And what might that problem be? The federal report called fisheries the “most significant man-made factor affecting the conservation and recovery of the Loggerhead.” So, while we make sure the beaches remain as secure as possible, the hole we have to fix is the old fishing hole. All fisheries, not just some, should be required to use the modified nets and modified hooks proven to avoid most incidental catch of turtles.

It’s not easy being a sea turtle. Loggerheads take about 25 years to mature. Then females come out on certain beaches to lay eggs. The eggs must survive undisturbed for two months or so, and then enough of the cookie-sized hatchlings must survive every appetite and hazard of the natural ocean, plus nets, fishing lines, plastics and pollutants for another quarter century before big females in their 200-pound prime come back to do it all again—if the beach is still there and not overrun by hotels, condos, and arcades.

Now let’s skip to the Pacific side of Mexico. Baja, to be specific. The new study by Peckham and his co-workers highlights something long suspected, never well studied. It’s the tip of many icebergs.

Their study looked at two small fishing villages and their turtle catch—mostly Loggerheads. I was there briefly a few years ago and got a first-hand look at the boats, fishermen, and gear. They use narrow open boats about 22 feet long with an outboard motor. They have no GPS, no radios. They set and pull their gillnets by hand. It’s hard, hazardous work, and no guarantee of long life.

Until this study, virtually all the fishing-related mortality that had been documented was in industrial-scale trawl (dragged-net) and longline (miles-long line with thousands of hooks) fisheries. Hundreds of thousands of turtles are caught this way, and many of them are killed (see: Lewison, R. L, S. A. Freeman and L. B. Crowder. 2004. Quantifying the effects of fisheries on threatened species: the impact of pelagic longlines on Loggerhead and leatherback sea turtles. Ecology Letters 7: 221–231.)

But Peckham’s team notes that small-scale fisheries employ 99% of the world’s 51 million fishers, and their activities go largely unmonitored and unregulated.

Peckham and Co.’s main finding was that the two fishing villages they studied fished in areas also preferred by Loggerheads, and caught at least 1,000 Loggerheads yearly. Their catch rates rival those of industrial-scale boats.

Small-scale nets like these also tangle turtles in Baja

And those two Mexican villages help threaten the entire Pacific Loggerhead population for the following reason: all the Loggerheads off Mexico come from Japan—their only North Pacific breeding area—where the breeding population has dropped 90 percent in the last several decades. About a thousand breeding females remain. Juveniles concentrate in a couple of places in the North Pacific, but many cross all the way to Mexico, then stay for a couple of decades until they mature and head back to Japan. Everywhere they go, they meet nets and lines. Sometimes, they meet their death.

A Loggerhead drowned in a fishing net washes ashore in Baja.

Off Baja, a fisherman working a couple of nets from a small boat sometimes drowns more than a dozen turtles a day. Discarded turtles then wash ashore, and the local beach, as I described in “Voyage of the Turtle,” is a carnival of carcasses.

A Loggerhead mummified by the blowing salt and sand of Baja

The good news? Because the scientists worked cooperatively with the fishermen and spent years building trust, a consortium of local people are working to eliminate their catch of turtles, and to establish a national Loggerhead refuge. Bravo.

—Carl Safina

To read the scientific report: http://www.plosone.org/article/fetchArticle.action?articleURI=info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0001041
For more information, contact these authors of the paper:
Lead author Hoyt Peckham: hoyt@BIOLOGY.UCSC.EDU
Regarding turtle conservation in general - J Nichols: jnichols@oceanconservancy.org
For inquiries about graduate studies in turtle research and the Duke Marine Lab, Dr. Larry Crowder: lcrowder@duke.edu

I’ve just returned from perhaps the most unusual trip of my life. I was part of a small delegation of scientists and leading Christian evangelicals traveling to Alaska to gain, together, first-hand looks at the ongoing effects and implications of climate change (see footnotes for more background on how these people of faith and science came together).

Our group featured some A-team all-stars, including Nobel Prize winner Eric Chivian (he founded the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School), Jim McCarthy (he is president-elect of the American Association for the Advancement of Science), famed botanist Peter Raven, and National Association of Evangelicals president Leith Anderson and vice-president Richard Cizik, among others. Rev. Anderson put the trip’s rationale this way for the evangelicals: “Our theology has been in place for 2,000 years, and we’re connecting it to 21^st Century science.” Dr. Chivian said, “Both scientists and evangelicals see life on Earth as sacred and share the same deep sense of responsibility about protecting it.” And while some hardliners in the Christian Right are afraid that concerns about nature will undermine their agenda, Cizik told us that more than 60 percent of American evangelicals surveyed actually said they are “concerned” or “very concerned” about global warming. (For a full list of the delegates and more details, see http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/08/070829120500.htm.)

Our group traveled to Seward, Homer, and Shishmaref.

The Kenai Peninsula; Seward and Homer

Seward and Homer are in the southern part of the state, on Alaska’s stunning Kenai coast.

Perhaps most emblematic of climate change is that nearly all the world’s glaciers are melting. We walked to, or viewed, or flew over, glaciers that have shrunk miles and thinned considerably in recent years, at accelerated rates. In some parts of the world this has serious implications for cities founded to take advantage of snowmelt and glacier melt. Such cities’ water supplies are threatened. Here on the Kenai, we found implications for Alaskan wildlife.

Sockeye and Chum Salmon had migrated upstream and were spawning.

But in some streams, they’re now having trouble with low water levels and temperatures that stress them, their eggs, and their young.

Low water also means lost wetlands, and many of Alaska’s wetlands and small lakes are shrinking, drying, and becoming forested land. We saw that too, with trees growing on former bogs where we were shown sediment cores indicating these places never had trees before.

Further, insects such as the Spruce Bark Beetle, which formerly couldn’t survive the cold of most winters, are now thriving. They’re infesting and killing trees.

Where we were, all the large old spruces were dead, and from the air about half the forest consisted of dead trees.

Next, these dried-out trees become susceptible to wildfires. We saw many burned acres. Before they burn, if possible, people cut the trees off large areas of land. You might have lived in house in the forest and suddenly find yourself with a view of the ocean. With logging roads in, and trees out, the next stage is development. Real estate agents, infesting the place like the beetles they’re replacing, aggressively advertise “emerging view” properties.

This is clearly bad for wildlife, and for landscapes that people identify with, including lands full of forests, cold hard-flowing streams, and bountiful runs of salmon. But is a little warming really a problem for people in a state once dubbed Seward’s Icebox?

Shishmaref

The village of Shishmaref lies on a small barrier island just off the Seward Peninsula and almost on the Arctic Circle. On its ocean side it confronts the Chukchi Sea. Its Inupiat Eskimo natives have lived here at least several centuries, and some say the place has been continually occupied for as long as 4,000 years. This site is ideal because it is a small island with two easy inlets to the ocean for seal-hunting and netting salmon, and access to a broad shallow bay where they can reach hunting and gathering sites on the mainland. A visitor might see them as in the middle of nowhere. They see themselves as living at the center of their food supplies.

Kids now splash and swim in the ocean. They couldn’t do that before. Fun. But climate change now threatens their homes, island, and self-identity. Several things are happing. Sea ice is melting earlier, exposing the island to severe winter storm waves. Battering winds can take away up to 30 feet of land in one storm. Nearly two-dozen houses have been lost. Unusually high tides with no wind, called “silent storms,” also create erosion.

A few feet below the surface of the ground, the soil has for thousands of years been permanently frozen. But this “permafrost” is melting, leaving bluffs more vulnerable to erosion by waves. Melting permafrost is a problem with food storage too, because the natives used to dig to the permafrost to put staples like seal meat into summer cold-storage.

As ice melts earlier, the whole marine ecosystem is changing. Rich spring plankton blooms used to happen when ice melted around April. At that time there was enough sunlight for photosynthesis by single-celled plant plankton (phytoplankton) but it was too cold for tiny animal “zooplankton.” The plant-plankton bloomed and sank, taking nutrients to the bottom, creating rich seafloor populations of shrimp-like amphipods and shellfish that were heavily relied on by Gray Whales, Walruses, diving ducks, and others.

But now the sea ice melts when there’s not enough light for the plant-plankton, so the nutrients that were in the ice just dissipate. Later in the spring, warm and stable surface water allows a bloom but it’s less intense, and it comes at a time when the water’s warm enough for zooplankton to live in. The zooplankton graze the plant plankton before it can sink. It’s also warm enough for fish to move in to take advantage of the new zooplankton populations. So the whole food chain shifts away from links favoring whales and ducks to a chain favoring fish such as Pollock that are expanding northward.(To see how this ties to Gray Whales arriving skinny at their Mexican breeding grounds, see: http://www.ocregister.com/science-technology/whales-gray-ocean-1836844-water-whale.)

Seals and Walrus—staple foods for Shishmaref’s 600 people—are less available as ice melts earlier and moves farther away. And the animals themselves are suffering. Walruses are coastal animals that forage for shellfish on the continental shelf. As sea ice shrinks away from the coastlines, Walruses must commute farther between ice and foraging areas. Recently, as commutes have gotten too long, they’ve begun abandoning their pups. Diving ducks of certain species are crashing in numbers. Seals of species that give birth on sea ice are facing hard times. And Polar Bears, which depend on ice for hunting seals, are also having difficulty as ice disappears. Drowned Polar Bears have been reported as distances between ice increase dramatically (the bears can swim tens of miles, but not hundreds). Skinny bears, too thin to raise cubs, indicate major problems for these animals.

And for people. Like Polar Bears, Eskimo hunters can no longer rely on the stability or even presence of sea ice. And additional snow cover (warming air is actually making more snow) makes ice hard to read. When an Eskimo snowmobile crashes through thin ice that experience tells them should have been about six feet thick, and a person drowns—as has happened several times in Shishmaref—it means global warming is killing people, too.

So with their way of life washing, melting, and moving away from under them, the people of Shishmaref voted to move. They want to lift their homes and the nice school off the ground, and move them over the ice about ten miles to an unoccupied site on the mainland, a familiar place they’ve long used for picking berries in summer. That will take an estimated $180 million dollars. Since they voted in 2002 to move, they don’t seem any closer to figuring out where that money will come from. Meanwhile, they have gotten money to armor their beach with large boulders sent from Nome. That will buy some time.

Shishmaref is a messy place with no paved streets, full of abandoned snowmobiles and mechanical junk, beset by problems from the influx of Western food (kids constantly eat candy and drink soda, and even many grade-schoolers have rotten teeth).

Yet community bonds are stronger here than perhaps anywhere I’ve ever been. No one seems to consider simply moving away. The problem facing them is how to move their community, so that they remain together. This commitment to their place and to each other deeply touched me. And I found that, yes, it seemed critical to save it. The place seemed touched by magic when, on our last night, we were outside stargazing at about one a.m. with sundown still blushing the western sky, green curtains of the Northern Lights snaking through the heavens, and a full lunar eclipse—all together at once. Truly awesome.

Ultimately, warming and sea level rise will take the sandy island of Shishmaref. As I pondered their ponderous plight and the difficulties of moving 600 people 10 miles to an unoccupied site, several thoughts suddenly struck me: One, I am them. The arctic is warming faster than the rest of the world, so their plight is headed my way; my house, which I also occupy because of easy access to food from the sea, is just a few sandy feet above sea level. Last winter, our neighborhood lost several yards of beach. Much more importantly, I thought this: “If these 600 people are having so much trouble with a short move to an unoccupied site, what happens when it comes time to move millions of people from a sea-flooded Bangladesh?

The night before we left Alaska we enjoyed a meal of salmon and crab legs, part of Alaska’s unparalleled, precious—I might say sacred—ocean bounty. For desert, fittingly, we were served “baked Alaska.”

As scientists, we have scientific authority. But for moral authority, people look to religious leaders. Scientists develop information about how the world is changing. Religions formulate responses to the changing world. These two most powerful forces in society need each other if we are to chart a path of survival into the future.