Humpbacks seem to enjoy human company. Ed and I went out in a Zodiac off Maui, a twelve-foot yellow blow-up captained by a sun-kissed young man. We soon found ourselves surrounded by a pod of almost twenty Humpbacks, a rowdy bunch of bachelors that began circling us, diving under the little boat, gently lifting it a few inches, and then breaching eighty feet away, their entire bodies rising out of the water in unrestrained leaps like victorious football fans at touchdown. Our young guide was over the moon with excitement and begged us to jump in the water with them. “They want to play!” he kept exclaiming. Alas, and I still regret it, I didn’t have the courage to do so.
The most affecting story I heard about Humpbacks was from my friend Victor Perera. In Northern California a whale became entangled in fishing lines, which threatened to drown it. Divers worked for hours to free the whale, and when the last line was removed, rather than swim away the Humpback gently bumped each man, the great whale eye making contact with the human one before returning to the deep.
On pelagic trips when I go out to sea with birding buddies to sight shearwaters, skuas, and jaegers, we sometimes glimpse Humpbacks or Finbacks breaching in the late-day sun on the Atlantic horizon. Or the rare Bottlenose Whale, its melon head and smiley beak popping up to have a look at us in the Gully, an ocean trench 125 miles off the coast of Nova Scotia. The Bottlenose and other beaked whales are particularly sensitive to mid-frequency sonar, which interferes with their echolocation. They will move rapidly away from military sonar testing in the ocean, but not fast enough in many cases. Thousands of beaked whales have beached themselves worldwide, the victims of decompression sickness and rapid surfacing. Joshua Horwitz recounts the long fight to end sonar testing in his riveting book War of the Whales.
Along the California coast on a pelagic tour of Monterey Bay with the legendary seabird expert Debi Shearwater, fellow birders and I watched seven Orcas, a pudgy black and white baby safe in the middle of the pod, chase Gray Whales as they migrated north, hoping to snatch one of their babies. The mother and nurse Grays kept their young protectively on the starboard side nearest the shore as they cruised their way to Alaska.
When Ed and I moved to Nova Scotia I was thrilled to see Pilot Whales and occasional Minkes off our shore along with Porpoises and Dolphins. But the oddest encounter was with the carcass of a Finback, the second largest and my favorite whale. They barely unveil at the surface, their single fin cresting out for only a moment like a periscope before submerging again.
Roger Payne has studied whales most of his life. He found that Fin Whales emit deep-frequency sound waves traveling special ocean channels for thousands of miles where the speed of sound is slowest. On quiet days when these channels are not disturbed by the noise of ship traffic, the Finback’s sounds can travel as far as thirteen thousand miles, half the diameter of the earth! These channels are also used for submarine warfare, and before it was discovered that the Fin Whales made these sounds the government thought they were from foreign military sonar.
There is a small cove, about one hundred yards of beach, just south of our place on the Nova Scotia coast. The ocean waters beyond it are fairly shallow, ten to eighty feet deep, with numerous granite islands jutting up, good nesting sites for Eiders, Black Guillemot, Cormorants, and some Puffins, but tough to maneuver for both big boats and big mammals like whales. Historically this part of the south shore was known as the Ragged Islands.
A fifty-five-foot Fin Whale washed ashore in this small cove, and died of unknown causes. Because the weather was warm and the stench severe, the whale was buried deep in the sand. A year and some months later between Christmas and New Year’s, Ed and I found another Fin Whale, sixty-five feet long, dead in exactly the same spot. No one bothered to bury this one because it was so cold. We watched over the course of a week as Herring and Black-backed Gulls first took the eyes, then made their way through the baleen to eat some of the huge tongue, and then pecked down the back, stripping the skin along the vertebrae to get at the blubber. Other animals must have come in at night, perhaps Foxes, Coyotes, or Great Horned Owls, because the flesh was almost gone in ten days.
It is a mystery why the great whale came ashore in exactly the same place. It is not easy to negotiate the Ragged Islands. Were the two related? Like Elephants, are they able to find their kin? Is this cove a whale graveyard? These questions remain unanswered, as do many questions about ocean life.
Robert Ballard, director of the Ocean Exploration Trust, said, “We played golf on the moon before we went to the mid-Atlantic ridge, which is the single largest geological feature of our own planet; we have better maps of Mars than of some parts of our ocean floor.” The variety of life and life systems—the biodiversity of the ocean—is staggering. It is estimated that 50 percent to 80 percent of all life is under the sea, and 95 percent of it remains unexplored. Too bad young Charles Darwin didn’t get the chance to jump from the Beagle into the waters of the South Pacific. He would have been gobsmacked. It is really only now, however, that we have technology advanced enough to penetrate to the bottom of the ocean floor and shine a light on the creatures there. Most of them have their own luminescence, as sunlight does not penetrate below three thousand feet. They are stars in their own firmament of darkness.
The ocean is full of man-made perils. The rise in acidity due to carbon fallout threatens diatoms, corals, fish, and people and will not be able to sustain many forms of life for long. And as the trash bin of the world, the ocean seemed limitless. We thought it could absorb whatever we threw at it: garbage, oil, chemicals, radioactive containers, or plastics. Huge gyres of waste circling in ten-mile-wide whirlpools are now exposed through satellite photos. Nothing can hide anymore. Fish the world over are found to be contaminated with mercury, tiny beads of plastic, and the general effluent of human trash.
The Northern Gannet, my favorite seabird, plunge-dives from more than fifty feet straight into the ocean for baitfish. It is stunning to see this large white bird streamline its wings against its body like an Olympic swimmer and split the water with its long gray beak. Every summer I find a few dead Gannets on our beach. I cut one open and found bits of blue plastic, probably a fisherman’s recycling bag, in its stomach. He must have mistaken its glint in the sun for small herring.
Commercial fishing vessels have exploited many coastal areas, exhausting legal limits. The deep ocean, two-thirds of which lies beyond the boundaries of any one country and is a free-for-all without regulations (although the UN is trying to impose them), is where fleets are fishing now with high-tech gear, staying at sea for years at a time like the old whaling vessels did. This puts world panocean travelers like the Bluefin Tuna in peril.
Carl Safina, one of our finest nature writers, has three pages in his elegiac book Song for the Blue Ocean describing why the Bluefin is so remarkable:
The bluefin’s immense strength and stamina are not mere by-products of its size. Some sharks get big, but the strength of a five-hundred-pound shark does not compare to that of a five-hundred-pound bluefin…the combined, coordinated functioning of millions of muscle cells that are among the most powerful and specialized in any creature…Making the bluefin so unbelievably tough is a body thoroughly designed to penetrate cold, food-rich waters and rule as the top predator there…Of more than thirty thousand fish species plying the world’s waters, the bluefin tuna is among the few that have developed the ultimate weapon of vertebrates: heat.
It is heat racing through the vascular network of the Bluefin, the billfishes, and a few sharks like the Great White, the Mako, and the Porbeagle that make them so specialized and unique. There is simply no ocean animal as powerful. No wonder men have been strapped into chairs bolted to slippery decks in an effort to reel in these masterful creatures. It is like taming a giant stallion.
In the 1950s, tuna fishing attracted Hollywood stars, British royalty, and machismos like Ernest Hemingway to the little town of Wedgeport, Nova Scotia. My father and his friend John Morris were among those castin
g their lot for the great fish. On one trip John caught a whopping 780-pound Tuna that took him eleven hours to reel in, while Dad had one not so niggling at 395 pounds. Its tail was mounted and hung proudly in our living room for years.
Commercial fisheries for the giant also began in the 1950s, but that and sportsfishing did not deplete the population of Bluefin Tuna. Our palates did. With the introduction of sushi and sashimi to gastronomy in the 1960s and ’70s the Bluefin had more to fear than the Japanese; it had the entire Western world after it. The species plummeted an estimated 85 percent. By 1999, the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas, or ICCAT, had a twenty-year rebuilding plan that halved catches and placed moratoriums.
Overfishing is the single most egregious factor in the depletion of fish stocks around the globe. While technology has been a boon to fishermen, revealing weather patterns and fish migrations and mapping the ocean floor, it has been a disaster for fish, which used to have a sporting chance. It has also been a disaster for seabirds, turtles, dolphins, and whatever else is caught by accident in nets or on hooks.
In the South Pacific, albatross and petrels dive for baitfish on one of thousands of hooks trailing sometimes thirty miles behind huge long-lining vessels. They get hooked, pulled under, and drowned. The Wandering Albatross, with the largest wingspan of any bird at more than eleven feet, is a master of aerodynamics, riding a current of air over the waves, rarely flapping at all. It spends its life at sea except for breeding season, and then the pair, mated for life, return to the same remote island and lay a single egg in a colony of thousands.
Wisdom is the name of one Layson Albatross, the oldest living banded bird on earth. She was banded on Midway Atoll in 1956 and was thought to be sixty-five in 2016. She and her mate have raised thirty to thirty-five chicks through the years, which they incubated and fed for seven months before they fledged. She still lays an egg a year. She flies about fifty thousand miles annually in search of food, putting her at the top of the million-mile club.
Nineteen of the twenty-one species of albatross are in trouble.
They get hooked on long-lines or they ingest plastics and other litter, or they are poisoned by chemical runoff from ships and coastal sites, or rats and snakes eat their eggs and chicks.
Most fishermen do not wish to harm bycatch they hook or net. They don’t want to be fined, either. If it is economically feasible for them they will switch to nets that release turtles and other creatures, they will tie ribbons on their lines, and they will use better hooks. More and more fishing vessels are adopting new technology, such as that invented by a conservationist and two Ecuadorean fishermen. This device not only saves birds, it saves time baiting hooks and injury to fishermen’s hands. Hundreds of baited hooks on lines are chuted into a six-foot tube that then goes overboard, quickly releasing the hooks underwater before the birds can grab them. This kind of ingenuity has saved many an albatross. There will be more smart inventions and more regulations in place in the future. Many people are working on it. Technology is both the nemesis and the savior of conservation efforts.
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Salmon is a fish that feeds the world, and we have done a lousy job of keeping it wild and healthy. It is a gorgeous creature, revered by Native Americans for thousands of years. It has a complex life cycle that takes it to the open ocean as a smolt and back to the same river, sometimes the very place where it was hatched, one or two years later. The female lays her eggs in the clear gravelly bed of a pool, the male deposits his milt over them, and the process begins again. The old salmon die in these streams, becoming nutrients for tiny aquatic species as well as bears and eagles.
Because of pollution, damming, and silting of our great rivers, salmon species have declined so dramatically that Alaska is the only place in North America where great runs occur consistently and the stocks have been well managed.
Most salmon is farmed today. Aquaculture is controversial because the business of feeding and growing salmon in ocean pens is a dirty business. Keeping salmon in pens compromises the very heart of these long-distance migrants. They are carnivores and are fed pellets of ground-up baitfish like mullet, herring, and sardines, compounding the depletion of smaller species down the food chain.
In southwestern Nova Scotia there have been salmon wars over the farmed fish pens dotting the mouths of rivers, harbors, and estuaries. This is lobster country, and the fish pens are not clean. Fecal matter, waste food, and chemicals drift through the cages to the ocean floor and accumulate in piles many feet thick that disperse with the currents to smother seaweeds, shorelines, and larvae.
I was part of a breeding bird survey offshore in the boat of a fisherman who had been hired to dive down to check sediment levels for an aquaculture company. He described it as a horrific dead zone radiating far beyond the pens. Lobsters would not go near it. These blights on the ocean floor are as irreparable as mining sites above ground.
Salmon are given antibiotics to ward off infections that become rampant in crowded pens. Infectious salmon anemia (ISA), sea lice, and worms invade their flesh, although we consumers are told they are not harmful to humans. In addition, the salmon are fed pellets with minerals that contain copper, and copper is also found in the chemicals used for cleaning the nets; this is an element that does not break down, meaning the water remains contaminated in perpetuity, threatening all living things, including bathers on the beach.
The salmon wars have become ugly, with neighbor pitted against neighbor. Signs sprout in front of homes for and against aquaculture, and fights have broken out at meetings. Southwest Nova Scotia is billed as the “Lobster Capital of Canada.” Spawning grounds are in front of our house; if you dive down into the water you can see mother lobsters waving their claws in defense of their nest bowls on the clear sandy bottom. The chemicals fed open-pen salmon are toxic to lobster larvae, as well as adult lobsters.
Citizen action in southwest Nova Scotia in the summer of 2013
I eat farmed salmon. Not often, but I have little choice in rural Nova Scotia where the last wild salmon barely cling to existence in a few rivers. Acid rain from industrial sites in America’s Midwest has been blowing in from Indiana or Detroit on prevailing westerly winds for decades, destroying the delicate pH balance that makes eggs viable for salmon and trout. Enormous efforts to keep wild fish alive are now compromised by the added problem of escaped farm salmon that interbreed and dominate the gene pool, weakening the wild strain, in addition to introducing disease. Fly fishermen are staring at the extinction of the wild Atlantic Salmon.
Nova Scotia’s government gives big subsidies to aquaculture corporations, knowing that farmed fish is future protein for ten billion people—unless the world takes a sharp right turn and embraces vegetarianism. But many of the corporations mismanage their farms and take no responsibility for cleaning up the mess they make in the ocean. The government either has no regulations or does not do a good job enforcing them. Too often the entire stock must be killed because of disease, further fouling the waters. Here is a plea from a local resident on behalf of lobstermen, families, and all of us:
The removal of dead and dying fish from 3 open pen aquaculture sites in Jordan Bay and Shelburne Harbour, NS began last week and is ongoing. Thousands of gallons of waste water and debris are being released in both bays every day. Rocks are coated with thick grease. The beaches and salt marshes are strewn with salmon parts and grease. Pieces of salmon are floating in the water and salmon carcasses in various states of decomposition are washing ashore.
This type of activity is permitted by the provincial government, in lobster and traditional fishing areas. Private property and recreational activities are also impacted. The Director of Aquaculture told an upset local resident this week that “this is an efficient means of waste disposal.”
An obvious question would be, why is this acceptable anywhere in coastal/public waters?
Why indeed? Why is Big Oil permitted to drill anywhere it has demonstrated it ca
nnot handle spills? How long will the public’s health be compromised before big corporations take responsibility for the damage they inflict on all living things? Why does an accident have to happen first before a company or a government takes responsibility for outcomes?
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The old fish-processing plant in Clark’s Harbour, at the southernmost point of Nova Scotia and Canada, has been totally refitted as a Halibut nursery. Shelley LeBlanc met me outside, a tall gal with porcelain skin and a model’s figure. She picked up a cozy black cat at her feet, Rocky by name, and we went inside. Scotian Halibut has been around since 2001. Halibut take a long time to mature and the females are not ready to breed until they are seven or eight years old, the males a bit younger. Local fishermen brought their initial mature Scotian Halibut adults from deep waters, and they soon had their first spawn.
Iceland and Norway are the champs in this field. Iceland has been farming Halibut since 1980. They co-invested with Scotian Halibut and lately have been getting stock from them as their own fish stock collapsed; they are not saying why, but disease is usually the culprit. There are ten hatcheries in the world; Scotian Halibut is the only one in North America, and Shelley is the only person in North America doing what she does.
Halibut—Hippoglossus hippoglossus—are deep-ocean flatfish of the Atlantic from Norway to Labrador, Nova Scotia, and the Gulf of Maine. They are big bodied, sometimes reaching six hundred or seven hundred pounds—or they used to. They have been overfished and have been on the IUCN’s endangered species list since 1996.
Shelley led me into a cold, dark concrete room on the ground floor where the temperature was about forty-five degrees. There were rows of large tanks the size of aboveground swimming pools with water running through them. She shone a flashlight on one, and there were the most beautiful little translucent eggs hanging in the water world like tiny galaxies. They eat nothing at this stage; they just float there for two weeks in forty-three-degree water. She says making them is easy. You simply mix male milt and lady Halibut eggs in salt water and poof—the eggs develop. On average a female will give about one-half to a full liter, or forty thousand eggs, in one spawn. The champion ever recorded anywhere was a two-hundred-pound female that gave 2,182,773 eggs. In the wild, Halibut eggs drift suspended thirty to fifty fathoms down, feeding many different ocean dwellers.
Wild Things, Wild Places Page 28
