No fish, no rain, no bees, Part #2

Newfoundland

Marine mammals are frequent scapegoats for poor fishing. Atlantic Canadian fishers, having destroyed cod to the point that commercial cod fishing won't again be viable until well into the 21st century, took bloody vengeance on harp seals and grey seals this spring, not only killing and retrieving 285,000 harps and twice their quota of 8,000 greys, but also killing and leaving thousands more seals, whose corpses washed up along the Newfoundland coast in April and May. Public officials worried that the stench might drive off tourists.

"The Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans has steadfastly argued," pointed out Animal Protection Institute program director and Animal Alliance of Canada board member Barry Kent Mackay, "against all evidence to the contrary, including a marketing report from the Northwest Territories, that there are viable markets for 'all' of each seal; that the mature penis, recovered from about one seal in eight, is only one of many products from sealing that is of value to the international market. It is an absolute and undiluted lie. The dead seals washing ashore are a sure indication that this year's slaughter was a bloodbath, pure and simple. The sealers took advantage of the government sealing subsidy and tragically ideal ice conditions to vent their spleen by butchering as many seals as they could. By the way," Mackay continued, "I'm not sure why it is that we are supposed to be reassured by the use of the entire seal. I think that part of it stems from Newfoundlanders not wanting to think that they are working so hard on behalf of the Asian sex market, which involves abuse of children. Newfoundland has had its own problems [involving sexual abuse of orphanage children] and is a culturally and geographically isolated part of the world not comfortable with such concepts. But I think it may equally be some sensitivity to responsibility for the collapse of so many fish stocks, partly due to massive waste."

Killing much of the Atlantic Canadian seal population certainly didn't help salmon. On June 7, Atlantic Salmon Federation president Bill Taylor asked that the Labrador and Greenland commercial salmon fishery be closed, citing findings that there are now fewer than 200,000 large breeding salmon in the North Atlantic. Ten years ago, Taylor said, there were a million.

A hue and cry from fishers simultaneously brought the removal of sea lions from the vicinity of Ballard Locks, near Seattle. Overfishing and habitat destruction put the steelhead who traverse the locks near extinction, but the sea lions drew the death sentences from the National Marine Fisheries Service and Washington state Fish and Wildlife Department. They were reprieved only when Sea World offered to take them for display. NMFS is reportedly probing the shooting deaths of at least 30 other sea lions elsewhere on Puget Sound.

Sharks and sea lions

In California, the Fishermen's Alliance of Monterey Bay on June 14 asked Congress to "manage the uncontrolled population growth" of sea lions, accused by some of stealing up to 80% of their catch. Recent sea lion herd growth has apparently resulted from the destruction of sharks, their main predators. The shark species who prey most on sea lions give live birth to no more than two offspring at a time, don't reach sexual maturity until age nine or older, and are endangered in actuality, if not yet in law, due to increasingly intense fishing to supply both Asiatic demand for fins and domestic demand for shark cartilage, reputed to have cancer-fighting properties. NMFS estimates there are up to 181,000 sea lions on the west coast, still a fraction of their numbers when the first European market hunters came. Until 1995, fishers were allowed to shoot sea lions who damaged nets or stole a catch, but current regulations allow shooting sea lions without first obtaining a permit only in direct defense of human life. The regulations were tightened in 1995 because frustrated fishers were shooting first and making up stories about their alleged depredations later.

But the shooting has escalated with decreasing salmon catches.

"Seals and sea lions have always been targets of the guys who fish," says Ray Bandar of the California Academy of the Sciences in San Francisco­­adding that he's never seen so many shot before. Four dead sea lions washed up in one day near Half Moon Bay in mid-May: three definitely shot, one while eating a salmon, and the fourth probably shot after fouling a net. Dawn Smith, director of animal care for the Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito, told Richard Cole of Associated Press that of 345 sea lions rescued in 1995, 10% had gunshot wounds, including one who was hit with buckshot, birdshot, and .45-caliber bullets, indicative of having been hit by at least three gunners, possibly on separate occasions.

"Many have bullet holes in their mouths," Smith said. "That's what you see when they're shot following a boat."

Wrote Cole, "Killing or harassing sea mammals is a crime. But enforcement by the National Marine Fisheries Service is virtually nonexistent. Only a handful of agents patrol the California coast, and protecting sea mammals is just a small part of their responsibility. Even with more agents, the chances of discovering who shot an animal at sea are small. Dawn Smith says she knows of only one fisher who has been prosecuted in the past eight years for shooting a sea lion."

Media notice of the slaughter of sea lions followed by two weeks the unprecedented theft of 500 pounds of dried shark fin, worth an estimated $60,000, from a fish market in San Francisco's Chinatown. Explained San Francisco Chronicle outdoor columnist Glen Martin, "Demand for the fins has far outstripped supply since the January passage of a state law regulating the taking of sharks, say fisheries experts."

A more immediate stimulus to the demand may have been the April 29 announcement by Johns Hopkins University researchers and executives of Magainan Pharmaceuticals, at the American Associ-ation of Neurological Surgeons annual meeting, that the chemical squalamine seems to be effective in fighting malignant gliomas, the most common deadly form of brain tumor. Squalamine may eventually be commercially synthesized, but meanwhile comes chiefly from sharks' livers and cartilage.

Fishers and farmers of pen-reared salmon off the Scottish coast also have a long bloody record of seal-killing, but with the fish scarcity the mayhem has spread south into England­though as marine biologist Simon Foster of the Sea Life Centre in Scarborough points out, "Research shows seals are only the fifth highest consumer of fish, way behind humans, who are first. The effect on North Sea fish stocks is negligible."

North Yorkshire holiday beach-goers were horrified in late May when seven seals were bludgeoned and disembowled at a public beach. Marie Sweeting, 45, and her daughter, 13, saw three men approaching the seals, and heard them uttering threats. Someone else photographed the men. Yet at last report there were still no arrests.

Overfishing

While seals and sea lions had nothing to do with depleting fish, besides giving fishers someone to blame, climate change and pollution are major factors. The bottom line, however, is overfishing.

Oceanographer Jacques Cousteau, 85, is optimistic that fish can recover, given the chance. "In the sea," he recently told E magazine editors Jim Motavalli and Susan Elam, "the species that have disappeared [in the last 200 years] are counted on the fingers of the hands. Take for example the herrings of the North Sea. They were considered wiped out by overfishing four years ago. Now the fishing has stopped for a couple of years and now there are more herring than ever before. Why? Because in the sea, marine animals lay hundreds of eggs every year, like insects. The repopulation is extremely quick. It is almost impossible to exterminate a species in the sea without leaving at least two of them to reproduce."

There may be no great extinctions of fish, though the slow-breeding sharks and other large predators may be severely affected. But marine mammals are at risk, being warmblooded and therefore needing more than 10 times as much food as coldblooded fish and reptiles to sustain the same body mass. The friendly bottlenosed dolphin is a far more voracious fish predator than the fearsome great white shark, with far less ability to outlast a famine.

The baleen whales aren't at risk from the decline of fish stocks, but are imperiled by the collapse of krill and phytoplankton in much of their range, believed to be caused by climatic change and holes in the ozone layer which allow enough ultraviolent radiation to strike the ocean to kill many of the fragile microscopic plants and animals that are the very base of the oceanic food web. If baleen whales starve, or even fail to reproduce because of a food shortage, a collapse of fish stocks on a scale beyond the current failures won't be far behind, because the whole oceanic food web depends on the same source. Baleen whales will just suffer first because, as mammals, they need to eat more food, more often, relative to their mass.

Fishers

The solution to overfishing is simple: stop fishing until stocks recover, if recovery is possible. Sometimes this is done: Senegal on July 5 imposed a two-week emergency ban on octopus fishing. But politics dictate what can be done to a greater extent than nature. That's why the Senegal octopus fishing ban won't last longer. A two-week halt may slow depletion, and if properly timed may enable a stressed species to spawn in greater numbers, yet won't solve the problem of too many people trying to catch too few marine animals.

Even WWF, a leading advocate of managing wildlife like a factory for maximum sustained yield, agrees that overfishing is the primary problem for sea life. On June 8, WWF study pointed out that governments worldwide pay $54 billion a year to subsidize fishers, whose catch is valued at $70 billion. The subsidy level shows the clout of the fishing industry, which some fishers trace straight to God, through the former fishers who became disciples of Jesus­­even though they all apparently quit fishing.

The easiest way to deal with fishers is to buy them out. The U.S. spent $2 million in 1995 to buy and dismantle 11 New England fishing boats, and will spend $56 million on buyouts this year. But each vessel costs from $50,000 to $1.5 million: the government money won't go far.

A similar program is underway in British Columbia. The Canadian federal government hopes to halve the B.C. chinook salmon fleet, putting 2,200 fishers permanently out of business. The fishers, however, aren't eager to change jobs, even though the catch is so poor this year that 3,000 of them are either out of work or underemployed, along with 4,100 cannery workers. Hoping to survive the shakeout, commercial fishers and the Haida tribe have called for comparable action to cut recreational fishing.

The Haida in late June lost a bid for an injunction to halt catch-and-release salmon fishing, which they claim kills a third to half of all the chinook handled, but said they would appeal. Their case drew backing on June 5 from Jim Fulton, executive director of the David Suzuki Institute, who cited federal findings that more than 90% of fish hooked in the gills die after release, and 40% die if caught with barbed hooks. The official estimate of catch-and-release mortality is an incongruous 15%, because the government believes relatively few fish are either hooked in the gills or caught with barbed hooks.

Caught among the conflicting realities, B.C. fisheries minister David Zirhelt on June 13 ordered his staff to "gather information that will substantiate the impacts," and "recommend what steps will be needed to mitigate the effects." This is likely to amount to an appeal for more money from Ottawa.

To sufficiently reduce fishing pressure to enable stocks to recover, governments must not only buy out fishers, but also regulate the volume of fish the rest catch. That doesn't sit well. It means telling working people not to work, and perhaps means paying them public assistance.

"How would you like it if they told you that you could only work 88 days next year?" third generation fishing boat owner Harriet Didrisen, of New Bedford, Massa-chusetts, recently asked Reuter reporter Leslie Gervitz. "Try living off that."

Nations

The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea allows nations to protect fisheries by setting their boundaries 200 miles out to sea. This carries the risk of conflict when nations claim the same waters, but also allows nations to trade fishing rights. Aware of the advantages, and the risks of trying to keep open access to fisheries when other nations are adopting the Law of the Sea, the Japanese lower parliament ratified the convention on May 28, days after China ratified it, and four months after a series of clashes erupted with South Korea over fishing rights in the Sea of Japan.

European Union fisheries ministers meeting in Luxembourg to set new catch quotas on June 10 quickly "put down markers that the 40% cuts in the fishing fleet sought by the EU Fisheries Commission will be hard fought," as Patrick Smyth of The Irish Times put it. Ireland argued that reducing the relatively small Irish fleet wouldn't help, and that Spain should take the brunt. British fisheries minister Tony Baldry refused to discuss fleet cuts without changes in the quota system, which has allowed Spanish firms to buy 46% of the "British" quota­­and then overfish it by about 10%, subjecting Britain to penalties. This could only be changed by amending the EU fishing treaty itself; the European Court of Justice has already overruled British attempts to keep quotas at home.

On July 2, the EC halved the North Sea herring quota, and slashed the quota for some Scandinavian fishing areas. Sir Patrick Neill, Queen's Counsel, speaking for the pressure group Save Britain's Fish, argued that Britain had signed away sovereignty to the EC-administered Common Fisheries Policy. Under the CFP, Neill argued, British waters will be open to the Danish, French and Spanish within five years. Baldry insists foreign vessels will still be barred from the six-mile British coastal zone and will be regulated from six to 12 miles out.

Britain maintains the 200-mile limit around the Falkland Islands, off Argentina. Also on July 2, in a public show of muscle, Baldry sent Kenneth Parker, QC, to the Falklands to prosecute the Chilean-flagged Antonio Lorenzo for alleged poaching. The owners contend, as does Argentina, that Britain doesn't own the waters because Britain doesn't legally own the islands­­for which Britain fought the 1980 Falkland Islands War against Argentina.

Getting other nations to honor offshore claims and treaties on paper is the easy part of fisheries regulation. The rest is enforcement. The EC negotiations began five days after the Exeter Crown Court fined the Spanish-controlled Hallfend Company $150,000 for allowing the Mount Eden, registered in Britain but sailing from Spain, to exceed its monkfish quota twice last September. Hallfend was also banned from fishing for four months. Illustrating the complexity of fishery politics, the busts were made by the Irish Navy­­and the court couldn't confiscate the Mount Eden's gear because it had been reregistered as the Pembroke, owned by the Bellbeat Company, sharing the same address as Hallfend.

Lawsuits

Problems and pressures don't diminish even with only one nation involved.

Upsetting the Clinton administration's hope that a nasty fight over the future of vanishing salmon, steelhead, and trout could be postponed until after the November election, U.S. district judge Susan Illston ruled on June 27 in San Francisco that NMFS must decide within 30 days on whether steelhead trout should be protected under the Endangered Species Act. Illston is also to rule soon on a parallel case pertaining to chinook, filed on June 18 by California senator Tom Hayden. The California Fish and Game Commission in April rejected Hayden's petition seeking the same action.

In a verdict similar to Illston's, U.S. district judge Donald Ashmanskas ruled July 5 in Portland, Oregon, that NMFS has enough data to decide by July 31 if Umpqua River trout and steelhead should be protected.

Already, the cost of protecting salmon, steelhead, and trout runs previously designated under the ESA is astronomical. Shasta Dam, located in California at the confluence of the Sacramento, Pit, and McCloud rivers, recently required $80 million worth of retrofitting to insure that the water behind the dam keeps turning over, to keep the fish from getting too hot. This came on top of losses estimated at $40 million since 1987, due to turning off the Shasta turbines whenever necessary to cool the water.

No attempt to regulate U.S. fisheries escapes court. In other pending cases, three commercial fishing organizations on June 26 opposed the allocation of about 18% of this year's Pacific whiting catch to the Makah tribe, of Neah Bay, Washington. On July 1, the Associated Fisheries of Maine challenged New England Fishery Manage-ment Council measures to protect cod.

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