jjacquet | May 17, 2007Let's call him Marco. Marco came from outside the moutainous city of Quito to work on a boat as a 'pepinero' (a sea cucumber fisherman) back in 2003 (though it is illegal to hire outsiders as fishermen). He had never been diving before, but the other fishermen gave him a crash course. He stuck the regulator in his mouth and went underwater for a number of hours (some fishermen dive more than 8 hours in one day) searching for Stichopus fuscus. Marco made fast ascents (more than twice as fast as the recommended rate), stayed underwater way too long, and got really cold. He also suffered…
jjacquet | May 17, 2007Grab your seats and popcorn for the Evolution-Intelligent Design circus! Randy Olson's acclaimed film Flock of Dodos airs tonight at 5:30pm and again at 8:30 pm EST on Showtime. The documentary premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in April 2006 and has raised the heckles from many anti-evolutionists. The Discovery Institute has recently written to Showtime (what's with the 'soft touch'?) in opposition of the airing. But PZ Myers had already refuted their claims back in February. Find out what all the fuss is about tonight at 5:30pm and 8:30 pm on Showtime.
p.s. For further…
jjacquet | May 16, 2007 In the 1960s, Godfrey Merlen, a longtime resident of Galapagos, remembers hoards of spiny lobster antennae that resembled "bouquets of underwater flowers". Today, lobsters are a rare sight to divers. There are still a few refuges because the conditions are so rough that fishermen cannot frequent the sites. But, on calm days, these lobster homes are hit hard and the populations continues to the decline. According to Fernando Ortiz at Conservation International, the catch-per-unit-effort for lobsters in Galapagos has hit a record low. Almost all spiny lobsters caught in Galapagos are…
jjacquet | May 15, 2007It is difficult to nail down the exact number of sharks killed every year for their fins and accidentally as 'bycatch', but studies estimate somewhere between 30 and 100 million--70 million being a reasonably firm estimate. Much of the killing is done illegally or never comes aboard the fishing vessel. One participant in the SBflix contest made an excellent short film about the plight of sharks globally and aptly called it: 70 million. Watch it here.
jjacquet | May 15, 2007Many foreign vessels are driven to fish the Galapagos Marine Reserve (GMR) by the demand for shark fin soup in East Asian markets and the high numbers of sharks that gather in the warmer northern waters of the archipelago. Such was the case for the Nino Dios. In1998, the Nino Dios was captured with 8,000 shark fins onboard--equivalent to ~1600 sharks. Sharks, as top predators, are crucial to marine ecosystems and are also the backbone of dive tourism in the islands. The capture and finning of sharks is strictly prohibited within the GMR but it happens and it happens a lot.
As one ex-shark…
jjacquet | May 13, 2007The blog Eye on Miami posted yesterday an excellent post on shfiting baselines. They show a series of photos of Weeki Wachi Springs, Florida: alive in 1950 and more or less dead in 2006. Check out their blog post and a couple of the photos that were posted.
jjacquet | May 10, 2007If there was any doubt that we are farming the seas...these unbelievable photographs are of a throng of Chinese shrimp trawlers near the mouth of the Yangtse River--FROM SPACE. They were published today in Nature and hit the press.
Kyle Van Houtan, a conservation biologist with Duke University, discovered the technique to zoom in on the trawlers. He and shifting baselines' own Daniel Pauly are now working with the satellite data to quantify how much sediment is churned up by fishing.
jjacquet | May 10, 2007One of our longtime heros of Shifting Baselines is Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist Mark Dowie. In this recent essay he takes the Bush administration to task over their plans for large scale (too large?) aquaculture. What he notes is that, "while the U.S. Congress recently passed amendments to federal fisheries law that actually improved, built on, and strengthened the Fisheries Conservation Act of 1996, other branches of the U.S. government (NOAA and the White House) were doing this."
Blue Pastures in a Public Trust
The Bush administration has made bringing industrial aquaculture to the…
jjacquet | May 10, 2007About six of these newcomers have been seen roaming around Galapagos. If anyone can identify it, please post a comment.
Photographed at Punta Estrada in Academy Bay off of Puerto Ayora, Santa Cruz by Claudia Molina.
jjacquet | May 10, 2007The designation of the Galapagos Marine Reserve has not entirely buffered the waters from change. Tom Okey, a former student of Daniel Pauly, showed that the phenomenon of "fishing down the food web" is indeed occurring in the islands (though fishing at lower trophic levels has also yielded bad results, to be discussed in a later post). The sailfin grouper (Mycteroperca olfax), once the most valuable and exploited fish (see photo of seco-selado), once made up more than 40% of the catch but now makes up 20% of catch. The average size of sailfin grouper also declined and in 1996, it was…
jjacquet | May 9, 2007It is first worth noting that all Galapagos fishers operate within the boundaries of the Galapagos Marine Reserve (GMR). In 1998 the Ecuadorian government extended the GMR from its 15-mile radius to a 40-mile radius surrounding the archipelago. The reserve now encompasses 133,000 square kilometers of ocean and 1,300 square kilometers of coastline, inflating the reserve's status to the third largest marine reserve in the world.
With this expansion also came the complete ban of industrial fishing though the GMR does allow for artisanal fishing and thus is not considered part of the National…
jjacquet | May 8, 2007In 1792, James Colnett came to Galapagos aboard the HMS Rattler to scout a whaling station. Over the next seventy years, boats from the U.S. and England harpooned and processed whales in the islands. In 1835, Darwin made his famous visit and, six years later, he was followed by Herman Melville.
At the beginning of the 20th century, the first pioneers to Galapagos relied heavily on fresh and salted fish and turtle meat (there was no refrigeration). In the 1920's, the first commercial fishing occurred in the islands with Norwegian settlers who began the practice of 'seco-selado' (opening…
jjacquet | May 7, 2007Tortuga Bay is arguably the most beautiful beach on the island of Santa Cruz--with fine sand, perfect waves, and bobbing green sea turtles. It has no road access, which is part of its charm.
In 1988, when Jorge first started working as the Park Guard at the entrance to Turtle Bay, the 2.5 km trail to the white sandy beaches was walked fewer than 5000 times that year. In 2006 more than 60,000 visitors made their way to Tortuga Bay. But Jorge's baseline is outdone by that of Jacqueline de Roy, one of the pioneers of Galapagos who has been living on the island of Santa Cruz for more than 50…
jjacquet | May 3, 2007Tourism is not the only thing growing in Galapagos. The number of inhabitants has grown tremendously over the last 35 years and very few people have lived in Galapagos long enough to discern it. People can only live on five islands (one of which only allows an Ecuadorian military base) of the thirteen in the archipelago.
The population of the islands grew from ~5,000 to 15,000 between 1975 and 1998. Today, the population growth rate in Galapagos is around 7%, which is higher than any other province in Ecuador. Official census data from 2005 estimate ~24,000 island residents, though these…
jjacquet | May 1, 2007
In 2001, when I first came to the Galapagos, there were two flights each day. My baseline was, therefore, 14 flights per week. But island old-timers reminisce about the two-flights-per-week-good-old-days. When I flew in today, I was on one of five flights to the Galapagos Islands; there are now 35 flights each week.
Organized tourism began in the islands in 1969 with a few small hotels and boats. In the early 1980s fewer than 15,000 tourists visited Galapagos. Ten years later, tourism had grown to about 50,000 visitors. Ten years more and this number doubled. In 2006, more than 120,000…
jjacquet | April 27, 2007The waters around Galapagos are home to more than 500 species of fish, 17% of which are endemic. In 1998, the Ecuadorian government extended the Galapagos Marine Reserve from its 15-mile radius to a 40-mile radius surrounding the archipelago. The reserve now encompasses 133,000 square kilometers of ocean and 1,300 square kilometers of coastline, inflating the reserve's status to the third largest marine reserve in the world. With this expansion also came the complete ban of industrial fishing (though artisanal fishing is still allowed). But both the marine and terrestrial elements of the…
jjacquet | April 25, 2007This week the Vancouver Sun ran a story about the deaths of marine mammals at salmon farms, which smatter the British Columbian coast:
The Living Oceans Society says that within a two-week period a Pacific white-sided dolphin, harbour porpoise and Steller sea lion got entangled and drowned in the predator nets at Mainstream Canada's Wehlis Bay farm in the Broughton Archipelago.
The Sointula, B.C.-based group also notes that fish farms are only required to report mammals they shoot, meaning the extent of the total yearly deaths at salmon farms is unknown.
Sorry? Only required to report…
jjacquet | April 24, 2007FIRST ANNUAL SB FLIX CONTEST AWARDS GO TO:"WHAT'S WITH THE WATER," (1ST), "YOUR DINNER" (2ND), AND "OCEAN WAR" (3RD).
The Shifting Baselines Ocean Media Project announces the winners of the first annual SB FLIX Contest, sponsored by Patagonia, Disney Environmentality and Seed Magazine. The cash awards and prizes will go to three videos which are about water pollution, fish contamination, and a micro-documentary about the war President George W. Bush has apparently declared (at least in the filmmakers' imagination) upon the nation's oceans.
The winners are among over 70 submissions of one…
jjacquet | April 24, 2007
Two of my favorite writers of all time, Kurt Vonnegut and now David Halberstam, have died in the past month. In the spring of 1985, as I was a postdoc studying starfish larval ecology in Australia, I read The Powers That Be and it changed my whole perception of the American media world. David Halberstam was a powerful writer and a truly masterful storyteller--able to take the mundane facts of our world, find the drama, and weave them into stories that revealed the depth of human character. Are there many storytellers left these days who can do such things so skillfully? If you have an…
jjacquet | April 23, 2007
Two seafood companies in Britain were listed yesterday among the top 100 private firms with the fastest growing profits. Increase in seafood demand may lead to decline for wild fisheries stocks but not necessarily for revenue, which is what happened on the East Coast when overfishing of cod and other higher trophic level fishes led to an increase in high value shellfish. Hard to muster much fuss over shifting baselines when the profits continue to rise.