Dead Kittiwakes, Missing Fish, Seas Of Plastic - A Voyage Of Ocean Discovery

[hatrack]

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And then I see the dead kittiwakes. There must be some chance meeting of current and tide because they have gathered here. Their white breasts pockmark the sea like an evil rash. I want to ask Mike about it, but he is at the other end of the boat, checking lobsters for size. I want to ask about the protected area too: why are we fishing inside it? I’m an outsider, on this fishing boat, the Summer Rose, for the day, hoping to get an insight into the state of our marine environment from the people who earn their living within it. But all talk is going to have to wait until the last pot has sunk back down through the kelp forest beneath us to the silent seabed.

No indicator of oceanic health is as visible and well documented as the seabirds, and the news is not good. In fact, the statistics are catastrophic: research shows a 69.7% drop worldwide in the last 60 years. Birds are a popular and well-studied subject, with legions of dedicated observers prepared to go out in all weathers and count. This is not an extrapolation or inspired guesswork. Entire colonies have simply disappeared. At Sumburgh Head in Shetland, 33,000 puffins have vanished in less than a decade, leaving a handful of survivors. Populations of guillemots, fulmars, razorbills, skuas and terns have all crashed. And kittiwakes too. Of all the gulls, the kittiwake is arguably the most interesting: a supreme flyer with the grace of a ballerina and the ferocious temper of a cage fighter, they attracted Victorian hunters who took special trains from London to shoot at them from Flamborough’s cliffs. Adam Nicolson’s great and tragic book, The Seabird’s Cry, relates how one naval officer recorded the deaths of 107,250 birds in a single season. The feathers went into hats. Such was the carnage that in 1889 Emily Williamson founded the Plumage League for women who refused to wear them. It later evolved into the RSPB. Now, however, kittiwake numbers are in decline again and this time the causes are less visible, but no less of human fault. British seas have warmed and that has reduced the sand eel population, a particularly bad development for surface-feeders like the kittiwake.

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To get an idea of the sheer fecundity of oceans without people, we can only rely on eye-witness accounts and a few grainy black and white films. Footage from 1933 shows the same Flamborough North Landing slipway that Mike Emmerson now uses covered in huge cod and other fish. The beach below is littered with willow baskets overflowing with lobsters while men in flat caps and traditional gansey sweaters race around trying to catch the escapees. Accounts tell of herring shoals so vast they darkened the sea for a hundred miles, shoals so thick that boats got stuck in them. Likewise there were enormous beds of oysters in estuaries such as the Humber, and bluefin tuna that came hunting in packs off Flamborough. A world record specimen of 386kg was hooked there. One boat was towed four miles by another giant.

Humans have destroyed all these things. No oysters grow in the Humber; the herring industry is gone and so have the tuna. According to Daniel Pauly of the University of British Columbia, the world’s fishing industry is nothing more than a long-running Ponzi scheme, stealing from its capital and heading towards inevitable bankruptcy. When stocks are plundered from one area, the boats move on, venturing deeper and farther. When one species crashes, new ones are found, and sometimes renamed to make them marketable. So it was that the indigestible duo of slimehead and toothfish became the highly palatable orange roughy and Chilean sea bass. We are not unfamiliar with that trick in the UK – those catsharks Matthew is throwing back would once have ended up in chip shops as rock salmon.

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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/oct/07/kittiwakes-fish-oceans-plastic-marine-life-fishing

[democratisphere]

1. The sixth mass extinction is well on it's way.