Feral
Page 29
Something else appears to have changed. In the past two years Cardigan Bay has swarmed with jellyfish–not the little transparent moon jellies with which I was familiar, but species I had seen only rarely in the three previous years. Most of them are barrel jellies: solid rubbery brutes the size of footballs. Pale and ghastly, they fade the green depths; sometimes the sea appears to contain as much jelly as water. (I should emphasize that these are not scientific surveys; I am relating unquantified impressions. Unfortunately, in Cardigan Bay, there is no better source on which to draw.)
While the apparent transformation in Cardigan Bay has not been quantified, in the Irish Sea as a whole, and beginning long before I arrived on the Welsh coast, the ecosystem does appear to have been turning to jelly. A research paper links this change to a combination of warming waters and overfishing, in particular the herring fishery off the coast of Ireland in the 1970s.36 There, fishermen using paired trawlers pursued juvenile herring to turn into fishmeal:37 they were ground into feed for pigs and chickens or fertilizer for crops and lawns. I struggle to find the words required to describe the wastefulness of this operation.
This, the study suggests, might have helped to create ‘a cascading regime shift’, which tipped the balance in favour of jellyfish. With fewer competitors for the plankton they eat, they were able to proliferate. As the herring population begins to recover, this might go into reverse, though if the mackerel have gone, the jellyfish could once more have been released from competition.
Similar shifts have taken place, for the same reason, off the coasts of Namibia and Japan and in the Black, Caspian and Bering seas.38 In all these cases, small plankton-eating fish, such as herring, sardines and anchovies, which both competed with the jellyfish for prey and, perhaps, ate the young jellies, have been greatly reduced by fishing, and animate gloop has swarmed into the breach. Jellyfish can also survive much better than fish in water whose oxygen has been depleted by plankton blooms: they are among the few lifeforms that can live in the dead zones now developing in many seas. They also have a peculiar ability to resist the destruction caused by fishing nets: they can regenerate themselves after they have been shredded.
One paper warns of a ‘never-ending jellyfish joyride’.39 Beyond a certain density, jellyfish inflict on depleted populations of herrings and similar species what the herrings inflict on depleted cod: they prevent them from recovering by eating their eggs and young. This allows the jellyfish to proliferate further, wiping out other fish and threatening to replace them with a jelly monoculture.
The lesson emerging repeatedly from studies of the ecosystems of land and sea is that plagues take place when keystone species are removed. When they have not been heavily exploited, natural systems can, it seems, prevent explosions of native species and control invasions of most exotic species. They are also better able to withstand other disturbances, such as climate change, pollution, disease and storms. The planet was, before its foodwebs were broken up, controlled by animals and plants to a greater extent than most of us imagined. Evidence supporting James Lovelock’s ‘Gaia hypothesis’–that the earth functions as a coherent and self-regulating system–appears, at the ecosystem level, to be accumulating.
Our understanding of these issues suffers, like our perception of the state of the hills, from Shifting Baseline Syndrome. It applies throughout the ecosystems with which we engage, but it is especially powerful at sea, where fisheries scientists often recommend that stocks be restored to the state they recorded at the beginning of their careers, apparently unaware that this state was itself badly depleted. The past abundance described by explorers, naturalists and seafarers is often dismissed as fishermen’s tall tales. On behalf of the peculiar tribe of anglers to which I belong, I feel obliged to admit that on a few, entirely unrepresentative occasions, we have been known to exaggerate. But the remarkable wealth of the seas before large-scale fishing began is also attested by more reliable evidence.
An article published in the journal Nature used government fisheries reports dating back to 1889 to estimate the extent to which fish populations in the North Sea have been depleted.40 The results have revolutionized our understanding of the life it once supported. Instead of simply charting the amount of fish caught there, which creates the impression that the decline of fish populations has been moderate, it divided the fish caught by the amount of fishing power used to pursue them: the size and catching ability (larger engines, better nets, electronic fish finders) of the boats being launched.
When the British government first started gathering data, sail trawlers were beginning to be displaced by steam. Trawling in the North Sea had already been happening for 500 years, which means that the ecosystem was likely, by 1889, to have been gravely depleted. Even so, the researchers realized that, when fishing effort was taken into account, fish populations had declined not by 30 or 40 per cent in the following 118 years, as the scientists advising fishery managers had assumed, but by an average of 94 per cent. In other words, just one seventeenth of the volume of fish that existed in 1889 survived into the first decade of the twenty-first century. Fish stocks, they found, collapsed long before the amount of fish being landed declined: the landings were sustained only by ever more powerful boats, with ever more effective gear, scouring ever wider expanses of sea.
Haddock, they noted, had fallen to 1 per cent of their former volume, halibut to one-fifth of 1 per cent. But the most remarkable revelation in the paper was this: that in 1889 the fishing fleet, largely composed of sailing boats, using primitive, homespun gear, reliant on luck and skill rather than on fish-finding technology and all the other sophisticated equipment available today, landed twice the weight of fish as boats working the same sea do today.
Studies using different techniques have come to similar conclusions, both in our own seas and in other parts of the world: typically fish populations have been reduced by 90 per cent or more.41 Yet so powerful is Shifting Baseline Syndrome that even some professional ecologists are snared by it. The UK’s National Ecosystem Assessment, for example, which is generally a reliable guide to the state of the natural world, reports that ‘around half . . . UK finfish stocks [are] now at full reproductive capacity and harvested sustainably’.42 Yet the baseline against which it makes this judgement is the state of stocks in 1970. By then they had been reduced to a small fraction of their ‘full reproductive capacity’.
The same applies to the size of the fish that used to be caught, tales of which are frequently mistrusted by those suspicious-minded people who have never picked up a fishing rod. As the great fisheries scientist Ransom Myers found when surveying records of the first commercial fisheries on the ocean frontier, in twenty years the average weight of the tuna caught falls by half, while that of marlin falls by three-quarters.43 There lived dragons where none live now.
Heavy exploitation began in many places long before the Industrial Age. The first known ecological complaint about destructive fishing techniques is contained in a petition submitted to Edward III, in 1376:
the great and long iron of the wondryechaun runs so heavily and hardly over the ground when fishing that it destroys the flowers of the land below the water there, and also the spat of oysters, mussels and other fish upon which the great fish are accustomed to be fed and nourished. By which instrument in many places the fishermen take such quantity of small fish that they do not know what to do with them; and that they feed and fat their pigs with them, to the great damage of the commons of the realm and the destruction of the fisheries.44
A wondryechaun is an object of amazement. The object in this case was a beam trawl pulled by a sailing boat. The flowers of the land below the water is an excellent description of the lifeforms–the soft corals, sea fans, sea pens, tube worms, fan mussels and all the other delicate creatures (‘huge sponges of millennial growth and height . . . unnumbered and enormous polypi’)–which must once have thronged the seafloor around our coasts but which are now rare or missing almost everywhere. And catching
juvenile fish to feed to pigs? As the case of the Irish herring trawlers I mentioned a few pages ago suggests, not a lot changes.
The early industry sometimes managed to inflict great damage. The Scania herring of the western Baltic, for example, became extinct in the Middle Ages as a result of improved netting technologies.45 Significant ecological change may go back even further. The excavations at Bouldnor Cliff, on the Isle of Wight (off the coast of southern England), for example, suggest that the Mesolithic people who lived there 8,100 years ago could have been running a boatyard. The wood-working techniques they used were previously believed to have arisen in Britain only 2,000 years later, in the Neolithic. Among the discoveries are a plank split from an oak trunk likely to have been used to make a log boat, and a platform that might have been used as a jetty or quay.46 This suggests a fishing capacity greater and more sophisticated than previously imagined. Whenever a new fishery opens, the largest animals tend to be caught first. Who knows what monsters might have been extracted then? Ours is a dwarf and remnant fauna, and as its size and abundance decline, so do our expectations, imperceptibly eroding to match the limitations of the present.
It is not my purpose to dwell at length on the destructive habits of the fishing industry, some of which are likely to be well known to you. But I will briefly mention a handful, of which you might not be aware, which emphasize the need for a radical change in policy.
Every year the taxpayers of the European Union give €1.9 billion to the European trawler companies ransacking the fisheries of West Africa.47 Once rich in a remarkable variety of species, the continental shelf there has been stripped by foreign boats, destroying the ecosystem as well as the livelihoods of local fisherfolk, whose boats and impacts are much smaller. Fish is an essential source of protein for communities in West Africa, but the foreign fishing fleets have wrecked many of the stocks on which they depend. One estimate suggests that the volume of unwanted fish discarded dead or dying by a single trawler on a single voyage in these waters is equivalent to the annual consumption of 34,000 people.48 Ninety per cent of the licence fees the trawler companies would otherwise have paid to exploit these stocks is provided in the form of subsidies by the European Union and European governments. I wonder how many taxpayers believe that this is a good use of their money.
An investigation into a £63 million illegal fishing racket in Scotland discovered that a government body, Seafish (which ‘supports all sectors of the seafood industry’), took a £434,000 cut.49 Seafish is funded by a levy on the fish landed in the United Kingdom. It admits that it was aware that the Scottish fish were illegally caught, but, after consulting its lawyers, it continued to collect its fees. Chris Middleton of Seafish told me there was ‘no need’ to hand the money back to the government, and that ‘there’s been no call to do so’. Green campaigners claim that Seafish tries to undermine their efforts to prevent overfishing and that it defends destructive fishing practices against reform; the organization denies these charges. While other public bodies have been shut down or trimmed by the government, Seafish remains uncut and unreformed.
European fisheries help to supply Japan, whose government appears unmoved by the status of the species the country imports. Scarcity appears to stimulate its market. Charles Clover’s film The End of the Line presented evidence suggesting that the electronics company Mitsubishi, which controls 40 per cent of the world market for bluefin tuna, has been stockpiling frozen carcasses, which can be sold at many times their current value when the species becomes commercially extinct. The company denies this.
When an international meeting in Doha tried to ban the trade in bluefin tuna–now as endangered as tigers and rhinoceroses–the Japanese government, much as it has done during negotiations over whaling, bought the votes of enough poorer nations to block the attempt. As if to underline its contempt for efforts to protect this magnificent animal, at a reception a few hours before the vote was taken the Japanese embassy served bluefin tuna sushi to its guests.50 At the same meeting, Japan also managed to defeat attempts to regulate the international trade in corals and to protect some of the sharks that are hunted for their fins.
The demand for bluefin tuna, like that for rhino horn, shows no sign of declining as the fish becomes rarer. Rather, the fish is simply becoming more expensive. In 2012 a single bluefin was sold in Japan for £470,000.51 The restaurant owner who bought it said he bid so high in order to ‘liven up Japan’. He won the undying gratitude of his customers by selling cuts from the fish at below cost price.
We rightly deplore the apparent unconcern with which this species is being driven to extinction. But it is not a world apart from the habits of liberal, well-educated people I know in Britain–friends and relatives among them–who, despite widespread coverage of the impacts of unsustainable fishing on television and in the newspapers they read, continue to buy species such as swordfish, halibut and king prawns, which are either in dire trouble or whose exploitation causes great ecological damage.
To meet this demand, the world’s continental shelves are being trawled, destroying their sessile lifeforms–the trees of the sea–at 150 times the rate at which forests on land are cleared.52 In other words, every year half the global continental shelf is trawled. At this rate, it is impossible for the delicate animals destroyed when nets, beams, rakes and chains were first dragged over them to re-establish themselves. As farming and some varieties of conservation do on land, fishing reduces complex, three-dimensional habitats to featureless plains.
Until recently, much of the seabed was protected by the fact that it was rocky, and would damage any nets pulled over it. It provided a sanctuary for species extirpated elsewhere. But the rockhopper equipment developed in the 1980s and now used widely has made almost every hidden corner accessible. Those of us who enjoy exploring the shoreline are advised not to turn over rocks, for fear of crushing the creatures that live under them or on top of them, and depriving animals of their habitat. But across great tracts of sea, rockhopping trawlers turn over boulders of up to 25 tonnes,53 either flushing out or smashing the fish and crustaceans they harbour, destroying the habitat as effectively as a bulldozer in a rainforest.54
Sometimes I wonder what hold the fishing industry–a small component of the European economy–has over ministers and members of parliament. Does it sink the bodies of their political opponents? Does it deliver the cocaine they use? While I doubt the reasons are as exotic as these (except perhaps in Italy), the political power of this industry is often mystifying. Perhaps the most likely explanation is that while many voters are upset by its destructive practices, few have as strong an interest in curbing them as the fishing companies have in perpetuating them.
It took hunters and farmers millennia to inflict as much damage on the life of the land as industral fishing has inflicted on the life of the sea in thirty years. But, if this feeding frenzy can be restrained, the restoration of marine ecology will be easier than restoring terrestrial ecosystems, for two reasons. The first is that few marine species of the continental shelves, even among the megafauna, have yet become universally extinct. (This is likely to contrast with animals living around the abyssal seamounts, many of which are found only in one place, are poorly documented and very slow-growing, and are now being heavily exploited by trawlers.) There are some well-known exceptions, such as Steller’s sea cow and the Caribbean monk seal. But even animals which have been reduced to 1 per cent or less of their original populations–certain species of shark, tuna and turtle, for example–have, so far, clung on. There is enough time–just–to prevent them from disappearing for ever.
The second reason is that most of the species which live in the sea can reintroduce themselves to habitats from which they have been removed. Either the adults are very mobile (many fish and mammal species migrate hundreds or thousands of miles) or the eggs or young are released as plankton, which can drift great distances on the currents, like marine thistledown.
There is one sure means by which the eco
logy of the seas can be protected and restored. That is the creation of marine reserves in which no fishing or other industry takes place, and in which both mobile and sessile lifeforms are allowed to recover. In other words, rewilding.
In 2002, at two world summits, governments promised to protect at least 10 per cent of the world’s seas by 2012.55 In 2003 the World Parks Congress called for at least 20 or 30 per cent of every habitat at sea to become strict reserves by the same date.56 Despite the creation of a few very large conservation areas, such as the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park, covering 350,000 square kilometres, at the time of writing less than 2 per cent of the world’s seas has any form of protection,57 and only in some of these places is fishing wholly excluded.
In 2004 the British government’s official advisers, the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, proposed that 30 per cent of the United Kingdom’s waters should become reserves in which no fishing or any other kind of extraction happened.58 In 2009 an environmental coalition launched a petition for the same measure–strict protection for 30 per cent of UK seas–which gathered 500,000 signatures.59 Yet, while some nations, including several that are much poorer than the United Kingdom, have started shutting fishing boats out of large parts of their seas, at the time of writing we have managed to protect a spectacular 0.01 per cent of our territorial waters: five of our 48,000 square kilometres. This takes the form of three pocket handkerchiefs: around Lundy Island in the Bristol Channel, Lamlash Bay on the Isle of Arran and Flamborough Head in Yorkshire. There are plenty of other nominally protected areas but they are no better defended from industrial fishing than our national parks are defended from farming.