4 - Wednesday, October 17, 1990 - North Shore News

The mighty oc

WHEN I was out in the North Pacific this summer, there
was something seriously wrong.

After nearly three weeks at sea.
[had vlimpsed just three whales
in the distance. Except for a fairly
large pod of dolphins that showed
up one day north of Hawaii, |
saw only four of the creatures,
and that was in the course of a
2,400-mile voyage.

Some 15 years ago, | happened
to spend a couple of weeks in the
same vicinity of ocean, namely the
area north of the Hawaiian ar-
chipelazo, west of Vancouver
Island.

Back then, dolphins cavorted
around our bow every day, some-
times with several different-sized
pods appearing on the same day.
It wasn’t just at daytime, either.
They leapt about the bow by
moonlight too.

Another phenomenon !
remember: flying fish launching
themselves from the water, gliding
like a combination of a small
missile and a hummingbird. They
came up by the dozens, hundreds
of them being spotted within a
matter of hours.

This time, although it was the
same time of year and the same
latitude, I only spotted them half
a dozen times in alt. Just two
landed on the deck, as opposed to
enough to feed a crew of nearly
30 people.

The only birds | saw were
albatross — except for a couple of
what I think were puffins.

The mighty Pacific Ocean is dy-
ing.

The last decade has seen a
catastrophic decline in nearly
every form of life which used to
exist in its depths in awesome
abundance.

Halibut catches have declined
90 per cent. Alaska pollack,

California sardines and Chub
mackerel are among the 26 other
species of fish that are also ina
state of collapse.

No one knows how many
dolphins have been killed in the
past 10 years, but the number is in
the hundreds of thousands.

Even with the tuna industry
having cleaned up its act, dolphins
are still being decimated by beach
seine nets, salmon gillnets and,
worst of all, the cwo million miles
of driftnets that are set every year.

Ditto for porpoises, sharks,
whales and seabirds. At the rate at
which the Asian driftnet fleet is
taking them, squid, we can be cer-
tain, will soon experience a
precipitous decline, if they haven't
already.

Certainly, after a day and night
of monitoring driftnet vessels in
August, | was astounded at how
bare the miles of net were as they
were being hauled aboard with
heavy machinery.

I have a videotaped record of
all of this. You can scan the tapes
for several minutes at a iime be-
fore spotting even a single squid
in the net. Hardly a rich harvest.

Even the shark is in decline.
And although not a single whale
has been hunted in the North
Pacific for 10 years, it is glaringly
apparent that they have net re-
covered their numbers.

In the 1940s, an old skipper
told me, whales were so numerous
in the region south of the Aleutian
islands that they were spread from
**horizon to horizon.”’

By the 1970s, there were only
remnants of the once-vast pods.
The largest sperm to be seen was
perhaps 35 feet, less than half
their full-grown size. None surviv-

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CATHRINE

Cathrine McCulloch,

successful vocalist.

recording artist, and single mother of Dustin and

Cyrese.

“| had an abortion at 15. At 18 | became
pregnant again, and my doctor talked me out
of it, saying | would probably regret it. HE WAS
RIGHT. When { had my first child, Dustin, what
abortion was, suddenly hit me! | tell women
who call the Crisis Pregnancy Line now: ‘‘When
you have a child it will hit you too!”

Bob
Hunter

ECOLOGIC

ed the harpoon beyond puberty.

The survivors may have grown
to full adulthood today, but judg-
ing from their nearly total in-
visibility, there are not many more
of them now than in the final
days of the whale hunt.

The Blues, greatest of all
animals in the world, have not on-
ly failed to recover, they have
continued to decline to the point
where there may be less than
1,000 left.

It is not just the North Pacific,
of course. In the North Atlantic
there has been a 40 per cent
decline in herring and similar col-
fapses among the stocks of had-
dock, cod and halibut. ;

The Eas: Coast fishery, as most
readers will know, is just a year
away from a total shutdown.
Outports in Newfoundland and
fishing villages in the rest of the
Maritimes face oblivion.

How tong it will be before the
West Coast comes up against the
same dilemma is anybody’s guess,
but unless some sort of political
miracle occurs, I can't see it

(Copitanc Matt)

hele

Cans are

lasting another decade at anvthing
like its current levels.

The numbers are deceptive.

Between 1950 and 1970, there
Was an average seven per cent in-
crease in the annual global catch.

Since then, more and more
traditional fisheries have collaps-
ed, and there has been a general
reduction in stocks. We have
struggled to maintain roughly the
same tonnage, but this is based
increasingly on catches of smaller
fish which are processed into
meal.

The food value per tonne has
also fallen.

And it is not just a probiem
caused by technological advances,
ignorance of marine eco-systems,
or even the capital-intensive
nature of mechanizer fishing.
Demand for fish and fish pro-
ducts, increasingly for feed and
fertilizer, is soaring among Euro-
peans and North Americans.

The cause: our insatiable ap-
petite for meat. The more meat
we consume, the greater the de-
mand for animal-feed supple-
ments, including fishmeal.
Roughly a third of the world fish
catch now goes into feeding
animals to in turn be eaten.

The Japanese are the largest
consumers of fish in the world,
with an annual catch of 10 million
tonnes, followed by the Soviet
Union, with 8.7 million tonnes.

The Japanese, it should, in all
fairness, be noted, at least do not
waste the resource feeding other
animals. Some 60 per cent of
Japan’s animal-protein supply
comes directly from fish, whereas,
in countries like Canada, only 15
per cent of our protein comes
from the sea.

In all, 58 per cent of the
world's fish catch is taken by just
nine nations, each of them making

an ee

dying

use of enormous and efficient
long-range mechanized fleets.

Rising fuel costs, territorial
agreements and the collapse of
one stock after another is leading
to a decline in the number of
ships out in international waters,
indiscriminately taking whatever
they want, but the slow-down is
coming after the fact of biological
disaster, not before, as we might
hope for in a rational world.

itis a cruel twist, but the use of
fish to feed animals raised for
meat leads to a tremendous waste
of protein.

One tonne of fishmeal fed to
livestock produces less than half a
tonne of pork or poultry. So it is
not just that we are overfishing
the seas, we are putting our catch
to inefficient use.

In discussing the collapse of fish
stocks, it must be kept in mind
that the destruction of the ocean
eco-system is occurring at both
ends of the food chain. As the
fish disappear, marine mammals
are likewise vanishing. In despera-
tion, we turn to the cephalopods
and crustaceans. The Japanese are
particularly keen on squid, cut-
tlefish and octopus, unfortunately
for those species.

When we go after krill and
shrimp, we take food from the
mouths of baleen whales, seals,
and birds, as well as eliminating a
source of protein for the fish
themselves. We are hacking at the
bottom, as well as the top and the
middle...

And at the same time, we are
paving over estuaries, damming
spawning grounds, drilling for oil,
spilling, leaking, leaching
pesticides, herbicides and heavy
metals, as well as pumping
sewage into the sea.

I fear for our oceans. .
ee

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