Seven-Tenths

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  ICES’s first task was to discover why fish have a habit of coming back to the same grounds for decades at a stretch, long enough to generate a local fishing industry, and then one year vanish altogether. It was supposed that a change in the currents carrying plankton might be one explanation. Other ICES scientists tagged fish in order to study their movements. Still others concentrated on refining a method of dating fish which had originally been used to determine the ages of carp, that of counting the growth bands on a single scale. They noted that fish grew faster in summer and hence the bands on their scales became wider. It was a Norwegian, Johan Hjort, who finally discovered that the dynamics of fish populations are quite unlike those of terrestrial animals. Any single haul might well contain fish from two to twenty years old, and in very uneven distributions. He invented a terminology, calling fish born in a particular year a ‘year class’, then set about trying to explain why there were good and bad year classes. A good year class would dominate catches for several years at a stretch while members of a bad year class, even though they might have grown well as individuals, were thinly represented and for shorter periods. This was mystifying. Some unknown factor – not obviously the weather – evidently allowed great numbers of fish to survive one year but then killed off young ‘recruits’ in successive years. (No less mysterious was Hjort’s describing fish in terms of a military academy. This had no connection with ‘schools’ of fish, either, which derives from the Dutch word for shoal.)

  On the other side of the Atlantic, meanwhile, ICES had been anticipated by all of thirty years by the US Fish Commission. This was the brainchild of Spencer Fullerton Baird, who set up his base in a tiny village near Cape Cod named Woods Hole, which he knew and liked from having spent his holidays there. His laboratory, together with its research ship named the Albatross, offered the best facilities in America for marine biology. Baird died, much lamented, in 1886, not before T. H. Huxley had praised him for his work on fisheries which had yet to be done in British waters:

  If the people of Great Britain are going to deal seriously with the sea fisheries, … unless they put into the organisation of the fisheries the energy, the ingenuity, the scientific knowledge and the professional skill which characterises my friend Professor Baird … their efforts are not likely to come to much good. I do not think that any nation at the present time has comprehended the question of dealing with fish in so thorough, excellent and scientific a spirit as the United States.*

  Two basic questions which Hjort posed have still not been answered to complete satisfaction. One was: Which period of a hatchling’s life is the most critical? and the other: What are the factors which most affect its health and development? It is now believed that a good year class results if there is a rich supply of plankton during the first ten days after the larvae hatch. In view of the advances over the past 100 years in science of all kinds, including biology itself, this tentative conclusion scarcely shows a great breakthrough in knowledge of the life cycle of fishes. This in turn makes it odder still that governments on both sides of the North Sea have done so little to curb the ‘conspiracy of depletion’. After all, there has been overwhelming evidence of serious over-fishing throughout this period, among the most convincing of which was the effect of World War I. Submarine warfare and minefields closed many fishing grounds for four years, allowing fish stocks to regenerate. With the end of hostilities in 1918 North Sea fishermen landed fabulous catches, not simply greater numbers of fish but bigger specimens. This bountiful state of affairs lasted a short while, then deteriorated again so that by the mid-to late 1920s fish stocks were back down to where they had been before 1914. The obviousness of such evidence is never enough to convince governmental exponents of laissez-faire policies. Even in the middle of World War II, Dr E. S. Russell, the Director of Fishery Investigations at the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries, could in the same breath urge against over-fishing during the post-war reconstruction and also think it ‘probable that surface fish, like herring and mackerel … although a great source of food and wealth, exist in stocks too large to be depleted by fishing’.*

  To put it bluntly, nobody has the remotest idea of the full long-term effects of continuous over-fishing. It has recently been suggested that it might be causing genetic changes in fish stocks as the fish, fighting for survival, are pressured into earlier sexual maturation at the expense of growth.† Shore stocks may also be driven wholesale into deeper waters, as has happened in the Grand Banks fishing grounds off Newfoundland, with unknown consequences for the area’s ecosystem. Least of all can anybody say what impact the powerful krill fishing industry will have on South Atlantic waters, on baleen whales and penguins or – come to that – the entire food chain of Antarctica. By the mid-1980s annual catches were peaking at half a million tonnes. Since then, they have averaged 120,000 tonnes. It remains to be seen whether the fishery’s regulatory body, the Convention on the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR) can impose precautionary catch limits before this valuable fishery expands further.

  *

  One day in January 1988 two companions and I were in a skiff midway between two islands in the South China Sea when we spotted something curious in the water ahead. There was a ragged patch like floating seaweed or the top of a reef as the tide begins to fall. We knew the area well; we were far out in a deep channel where there were no reefs. Also puzzling were the antics of a small white tern which was standing, fluttering and fluttering its wings as if in some difficult feat of balancing on this patch. As we neared we could smell it before we finally identified it as a mass of rotting animals. We identified fish, a baby dolphin and various bird carcasses. The tern’s desperate agitations increased with our approach and we could now see that its feet were caught in the nearly invisible meshes of a ghost net, a fragment of drift net which floats and continues to catch almost any animal that comes into contact with it. With some difficulty we freed the little tern, the bottom of the skiff whispering over nylon and fins and bumping softly among the heavier corpses. There was nothing else to be done. Sooner or later, the gases of putrefaction having been released, the mass would sink beneath its own weight until fresh gas was generated or its heavier contents broke up sufficiently to filter out between the meshes. Then it would rise to the surface once more.

  After Japan first began using nylon monofilament nets for drift netting in its own coastal waters in 1976 there was a great expansion of pelagic drift netting. For years the Central and North Pacific areas were the principal focus of public and government attention, tending to obscure the fact that the practice was widespread in coastal areas as well. In archipelagic seas it caused immense damage to marine and bird life as well as affecting the livelihoods of local fishing communities. Pelagic fish are those which feed at or near the surface, usually in large, dense shoals. To catch them, drift-netters hung an invisible curtain of nylon mesh 40 feet high in the sea and left it to drift with the tides, currents and winds. Drift netting was a long-established technique, one that had been used for over a century in British inshore waters. What was new about the practice since 1976 was the use of invisible and virtually indestructible nylon mesh.

  For six months of the year the North Pacific was invaded by more than 1,500 ships, mainly from Japan, Taiwan and South Korea, together forming the world’s largest fishing fleet. Every night each ship laid between 30 and 50 miles of net, leaving it to drift for six to eight hours, so that in these latitudes on any night there could be anything up to 50,000 miles of net deployed, about enough to encircle the planet twice. The ships were highly efficient, with the latest electronic means for detecting shoals, especially those animals rising vertically each night as the Deep Scattering Layer, and some with additional sonic aids for herding them more tightly. Such nets catch almost anything which touches them, including birds and especially cetaceans, to whose sonar the filaments are invisible. Marketable fish were kept; non-target species and those of no immediate economic interest were dumped ov
erboard by the ton. It is a system which has been trenchantly described as ‘stripmining the oceans’.* From the fishermen’s point of view it is cheap and simple; from that of the ecosystem the effects cannot be determined since so little is known. But its results are not invisible. By 1990 even Japanese drift-netters were admitting they saw far fewer dolphins, seals, juvenile hump-back whales and seabirds than only five years earlier. Japan had long since banned drift netting in its own territorial waters because of the threat of ecological collapse.

  In a landmark victory for conservation, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution banning drift netting on the high seas from January 1993, though it was still permitted in coastal waters. The EU banned its fleets from drift netting in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean from January 2002, although after strenuous lobbying by Denmark, Sweden and Finland the Baltic was exempted from this protection. The practice also continued in other limited areas where exemptions were obtained, such as the UK coast between North Yorkshire and the Scottish border, where from June 2003 just sixteen remaining salmon and sea trout netsmen were allowed licences. But the trend is obvious: the practice is at last on the way out. To be sure, illegal drift netting still continues the world over, but it is steadily being reduced by better aerial spotting, reporting by ships and general enforcement. But rising seafood prices allow no grounds for complacency, and constant vigilance will be required.

  The activities of the drift-netting industry first came to urgent attention around 1983, and then only because Japan had formally requested US permission to go drift-netting off Alaska within the 200-mile EEZ. The intention was to intercept Pacific salmon on the way to their river spawning grounds. The US granted the permit, believing that these stocks were heading for Russian rather than North American rivers. Later, when the Japanese tried to renew it, the questionnaire they had to submit unwisely revealed that a typical season’s catch included an estimated 14,000 Dall porpoise as well as three-quarters of a million seabirds. (At the time the Japanese salmon fleet comprised 172 vessels, each with 9 miles of net, totalling a mere 1,548 miles as compared with that currently being deployed by the North Pacific red squid and tuna fleets.) As it happened, the salmon stocks were North American after all. This incident provided an excellent demonstration of how little is known about the movements of fish. The heirs of Spencer Fullerton Baird had misread the migration patterns of the most economically important species in Alaskan waters. This is to leave aside the ethics involved in the assumption that since they were Russian salmon they were fair game for plunder. It was only when the Alaskan and Canadian salmon fishermen began to suffer ruin from the depletion of their stocks that the error was acknowledged. In 1988 Japanese fishing boats were banned from US territorial waters, two years after a similar ban by Australia.

  Yet even today, East Asian markets are regularly glutted with salmon still being trawled illegally in Alaskan waters. This fleet probably takes 50,000 tons of salmon annually, and Earthtrust has estimated that the number of ‘dropouts’ and injured and dying ‘escapees’ equals the same amount again. If this can happen within the United States’ EEZ, it is not hard to imagine what goes on in international waters. Policing is slowly improving, and there is no question that the steady outlawing of drift nets has struck an important blow on behalf of wildlife. But those with a sense of history will retain their pessimism as a thwarted billion-dollar industry develops instead the technology for precisely targeting species, with the danger of their eradication (as in the case of the majestic bluefin tuna). ‘Quotas’ will once more be fixed by authoritative-sounding international bodies who cannot tell how much loss the ocean has already borne, nor guess what it still can bear. If the North Sea, surrounded as it is by a community of developed nations with access to the best scientific information, can be systematically ruined through conflicts of interest and political expediency, what real hope is there for the Pacific? Who is to police its vast, unclaimed areas, and to enforce what law? Under the virtuous flag of an abuse redressed, cynical attrition is as likely as ever to slither around laws and evade patrols, just as it does in the tiny pond of the North Sea. The issues will float up and down for years to come like ghost nets with their rotting cargoes.

  For now, even people with no immediate connection with fishing have noticed a decline in Pacific wildlife. As a geophysicist aboard Farnella said one afternoon, surveying from the rail the empty expanse of ocean on which floated a sheet of tar-stained plastic where eight or even five years before a school of dolphins might have sported, ‘We don’t deserve this world.’ The drifting refuse, the absence of any sign of life for two weeks but for a few flying fish and the occasional mournful bird was bound to make anyone take stock. ‘Homo sapiens sapiens. In this single century we’ve slaughtered a thousand times more people than all the Genghis Khans of history put together. Into the bargain we’ve laid waste our planet. Not bad going for a mere 100 years. And look what we’ve got in return. Machines for mapping the ocean floor and a brave new race. We’ve had the Beaker Folk and now we’ve got the Consumer Folk. Tesco Man. Homo supermercatus.’

  *

  The trait in the human species of harvesting first and assessing the consequences at leisure is clearly a genetic inheritance. Unlike felines, which eat their fill and walk away, we are in this respect closer to the canines such as foxes, which kill an entire roost of chickens they will neither eat nor bury for later. There is something hopeless in Homo’s mixture of brutality and compassion, a cross-purpose of muddlement. Even as Spencer Fullerton Baird was founding Woods Hole, Charles Wyville Thomson was trying to observe the creatures of the North Sea. He wrote of English fishing smacks being welled to supply fresh cod for the London market (this was before refrigeration). A large, square tank was built amidships with holes for fresh seawater to circulate. The fish, he noted, were oddly tame:

  It is curious to see the great creatures moving gracefully about in the tank like goldfish in a glass globe. … They seem rather to like to be scratched, as they are greatly infested by caligi. … One of the fish had met with some slight injury which spoiled its market, and it made several trips in the well between London and Faëroe and became quite a pet. The sailors said it knew them. … It was always the first to come to the top for the chance of a crab or a bit of biscuit, and it rubbed its ‘head and shoulders’ against my hand quite lovingly.*

  Treating a codfish as another Englishman might treat his hound may have struck his contemporaries as eccentric, especially since they were accustomed to a reign over the animal kingdom which was in general less than benevolent and often maniacal. Accounts of the huge eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century massacres of creatures such as whales, seals and sea lions make painful reading; even at the time, explorers and others sensed that something was not right. W. H. B. Webster, the surgeon aboard HMS Chanticleer during her voyage of 1828–30 in the south Atlantic, wrote:

  The harvest of these seas has been so effectively reaped, that not a single fur-seal was seen by us, during our visit to the South Shetland group; and, although it is but a few years back since countless multitudes covered the shores, the ruthless spirit of barbarism slaughtered young and old alike, so as to destroy the race. Formerly two thousand skins a week could be procured by a vessel; now not a seal is to be seen.*

  Captain James Weddell, making much the same journey five years earlier, had noted that both sea lions and fur seals were almost extinct on South Georgia, ‘not less than 1,200,000 skins’ having been sent to the London market, together with 20,000 tons of ‘sea-elephant’ oil. He evidently liked penguins, observing that ‘Sir John Narborough has whimsically likened them to “little children standing up in white aprons”’.†

  When fur seals became scarce, the ‘sea-elephant’ (elephant seal) was turned to for its oil, and Weddell noticed the animal’s pitiful docility. ‘It is curious to remark, that the sea-elephant, when lying on the shore, and threatened with death, will often make no effort to escape into the water, but lie still and she
d tears, merely raising the head to look at the assailant; and, though very timid, will wait with composure the club or lance which takes its life.’‡ In order to extract the oil from the seals’ blubber it was flensed and rendered down in vast iron cauldrons. Fuel being extremely short in these latitudes the sealers burnt penguins, each of which contained about a pint of oil. Finally, the supply of seals ran out and the sealers had to turn to the penguins themselves. ‘In common with all Antarctic creatures,’ observes Edwin Mickleburgh,

  they had little or no fear of man and it was therefore a simple business for the sealers to drive them into pens where they were clubbed and flung into the bubbling pots. It is recorded that some birds, in the interests of faster production, were driven down crudely constructed gangways directly into the pots where they were boiled alive.§

  Not that this sort of thing was confined solely to sealers and whalers. W. H. B. Webster, calling at Buenos Aires on his way south, had already heard a local resident describe how he had ‘once sold a flock of sheep, amounting to two thousand, at 1s 6d. per head, for the sole purpose of fuel for a brick-kiln.’*

  Looking once again at the North Sea and the Pacific Ocean 170 years later, we can see that there is little new about the creation of semi-deserts where once teemed marine and bird life. Nor, in its capacity to kill indiscriminately, does modern drift-net fishing really mark a new departure. Probably the only novelty is that of pollution, of animals being sieved from the sea and replaced with bottles and sheets of tarry plastic. Even in this matter the same muddlement and cross-purposes can be found, the same ironies. Thus, scientific bases in Antarctica, set up precisely to study a pristine, nearly sterile environment, have themselves polluted their surroundings. The worst offender has been the US base at McMurdo Sound, where surplus bulldozers have been casually tipped into the sea and open-pit burning and landfilling of wastes were everyday practices for years. Efforts are continuing to clean it up and many another base, newly uncomplacent, is discovering how expensive and inconvenient it is having to ship out hundreds of barrels of frozen faeces and urine in addition to the other refuse it generates. There is an irresistible parallel to be drawn between Antarctica and another pristine – and wholly sterile – environment: space. Since the space age started in 1957, 6,600 spacecraft have gone into orbit, of which some have fallen but plenty remain. In addition to these and their defunct rockets there are an estimated 500,000 fragments of junk, including screwdrivers. If in the next three decades the amount of debris in low Earth orbit increases at the same rate it will total 3 million tons and render any further human space exploration prohibitively dangerous. Various hugely expensive schemes for cleaning up space are currently being considered.