Marine life Hong Kong is building a new airport on fill dumped into the former main feeding area for highly endangered Chinese white dolphins, a subspecies found only in the Hong Kong harbor area and actually more pink than white. Of the 400 white dolphins counted circa 1990, only 50 to 100 survive --many in a bay already designated for similar development. The Hong Kong government has responded to the dolphins' plight by hiring biologists Lindsay Porter and Chris Parsons to document their demise.

The Kyodo news agency reported November 11 that the Japanese Institute of Cetacean Research is soon to sell 65 metric tons of meat from 21 minke whales killed last summer in the northwestern Pacific--the first whales killed there legally since 1986. The price is to be $17 per pound. While nominally honoring the International Whaling Commission moratorium on commercial whaling, Japan has killed 300 minke whales for "research" in the southern Pacific each year since 1987, selling the meat after cursory study. This year Japan planned to kill 100 minke whales in the northern Pacific as well. Kyodo didn't make clear how many whales of the quota were actually killed.

Retired shrimper Cyrus Seven has proposed starting a Kemp's ridley sea turtle hatchery near Houma, Alabama, to be funded by the shrimp industry in lieu of using much-hated turtle exclusion devices on their nets.

Another of the 12 former Ocean World dolphins who was flown to the Institute for Marine Sciences in the Honduras on September 15 has died--Squirt, age 34, captive at least 30 years. Doug Cook, her trainer until 1979, burst into tears at the news. "You might as well have told me my mother died," he said. "Squirt was the dolphin who kept me in the business. She had one bad eye--she lost the sight in it in the wild--but she was just amazing, like a person in the things she could understand and do. She would watch you training another animal, and all of a sudden present you with the routine, the whole thing, and get all of it right the first time. She would improvise during a performance, and if you tossed her a fish, it became a permanent part of her act. She loved to perform." Squirt died seven weeks after Trouble, her seven-year-old niece, succumbed to pneumonia. Worried by that death, Cook went to Honduras himself for a first-hand look at the Institute for Marine Sciences, which is part of the St. Anthony's Key dolphin swim program. He found the conditions and care excellent, he said, a few days before Squirt died, but added that he personally would have kept the dolphins in the same social groups they had at Ocean World, to avoid bullying, rather than putting them all into the same lagoon together. Two of the dolphins, Mabel and Tiger, are reputedly bullies; Tiger, he said, once killed a young dolphin in a fight over food after being starved as punishment by then-Ocean World trainer Russ Rector. After Squirt's death, Cook speculated that both dead dolphins might have overheated on the flight from Florida. Overheating, he said, may not kill dolphins immediately, but can lead to death later of problems such as cirosis of the liver that "can look like ordinary conditions of age."

Merlin, one of the first five dolphins brought to The Mirage dolphinarium in Las Vegas, died October 29 at age 30-plus. Veterinarian Lanny Cornell said the death was due to old age. An Atlantic bottlenose acquired in 1990 from the Hawk's Cay Resort and Marina in Duck Key, Florida, Merlin sired four calves at The Mirage, of whom one died in infancy; three remain there, along with the other four dolphins who arrived with him.

A National Marine Fisheries Service task force has voted 15-6 in favor of killing up to 40 California sea lions at the Ballard Locks in Seattle, to protect threatened and endangered steelhead runs. Protests are being coordinated by Mark Berman of Earth Island Institute: 415-788-3666.

Indonesia on November 5 banned catching and selling the rare Napolean wrasse, a seven-foot fish often caught through the use of poisons that kill coral. Environment minister Sarwono Kusumaatmadja said Indonesia would pursue a CITES listing for the Napoleon wrasse next year.

A humpback whale freed on November 16 by British and Omani divers after spending five days trapped in a fish net thanked them by leaping "out of the water six or seven times in succession, landing with thunderous splashes, as if to celebrate its newfound freedom," the team reported.

Famine hits Puget orcas

The orca population of Puget Sound has grown from just 68 in 1976 to 94 now, reports marine mammologist Ken Balcomb, of Friday Harbor, Washington--but may fall fast, as many whales in the heavily fished waters show signs of starvation. Males are apparently suffering more than females; several are missing, presumed dead.

The famine is a blow to the hopes of groups trying to win the release of orcas captured from those waters, including Lolita, 30, of the Miami Seaquarium, currently considered the best candidate. The Seaquarium tank is unsafe, Ric O'Barry of the Dolphin Project alleges, and could be ruptured by displacement from Lolita's leaps. By all accounts the facility is old, and will soon need either major repairs or replacement.

"No point in saving Lolita without saving Lolita's habitat," said O'Barry. "That's the real message." But having rehabilitated and freed numerous captive dolphins, O'Barry believes Lolita could still be freed eventually--after appropriate training. "We would build a sea pen for Lolita," he explained. "We would use the same system we used in Brazil," to free a dolphin named Flipper in 1993. "The gate would be opened only when we knew she had a real chance to make it."

Even if that time never came, said O'Barry, "If Lolita remained in a huge lagoon sanctuary she would be far better off than living in a deadend concrete box in Miami. Not all captive dolphins and whales can be released, but all can be readapted to a more normal environment."

Forty thousand people will have come from all over the world to watch right whales off the Valdes peninsula of southern Argentina by the end of 1994, up from 16,000 in 1991. The $14 million to $20 million they'll spend comes to far more in real value than the peak worth of the defunct Argentine whaling industry. But the whalewatching boom isn't all good news, says Argentine Wildlife Foundation marine biologist Alejandro Vila, who claims 80% of the whale-watching vessels break conservation rules. "They chase the whales up against cliffs, track them in tandem instead of individually, and separate the calves from the mothers," charges Vila. Right whales are the rarest of the great baleen whales. Barely 3,000 survive, of whom about 500 wean their calves and mate in the Valdes area.

A panel of 26 researchers who volunteer their efforts on behalf of the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary is expected to recommend a ban on "chumming" in the area, to take effect in early 1995. Chumming is the practice of dumping blood and offal into the water to attract sharks, and is used by entrepreneur Jon Cappella to draw rare great white sharks toward submerged cages full of thrill-seeking divers. Cappella operates near Point Ano Nuevo, home of one of the world's biggest elephant seal and sea lion breeding colonies--and just a mile from a popular surfing beach.

A study of guppies by Lee Alan Dugatkin of the University of Missouri at Columbia and Robert Craig Sargent of the University of Kentucky in Lexington has discovered that males choose less attractive males as their same-sex companions, apparently in hopes of looking more attractive by contrast in the eyes of females. Published in the November edition of the journal Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, the study proves that "even fish with brains as small as pinheads are capable of surprisingly sophisticated social behavior," according to Natalie Angier of The New York Times.

The Florida Marine Fisheries Commission has approved a ban on collecting live shellfish along the nine-mile Sanibel Island beachfront, effective January 1 if approved as expected by Florida governor Lawton Chiles. The Sanibel Island beaches are famed for abundant shells, but collectors who take shells still occupied by living mollusks have contributed to an abrupt decline of the local shellfish population.