Scubaism

A U.S. study focusing on global sea turtle populations has found that half a dozen species are still endangered or threatened despite promising increases in the number of adult females and nests, U.S. wildlife officials said Thursday. Officials with two U.S. federal agencies recently completed the five-year study after analyzing population trends, habitat conditions and conservation measures in the Caribbean and around the world.

The leatherback, hawksbill and Kemp’s ridley turtle species are listed as endangered. The breeding populations of Olive ridley and green sea turtles are endangered along Mexico’s Pacific Coast, and threatened elsewhere, the study found.

Coastal development, beachfront lighting, pollution and hunting are contributing to the demise of the sea turtles, which come ashore periodically to lay their eggs in “nests” dug in the sand, according to the study.

“Threatened” means a species could become “endangered,” which means the species might face extinction.

But some sea species were found to be doing well in specific areas where conservationists and researchers helped to protect their habitat, said Sandy MacPherson, national sea turtle coordinator for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which conducted the review along with the National Marine Fisheries Service.

“A lot of times that has to do with the fact that there is a dedicated research program,” she said, adding there has been an increase in leatherback nests in Puerto Rico, where prime nesting spots for the endangered sea turtles draws international researchers.

The study is federally mandated every five years, but the last study was done in 1995 because of funding and staffing problems, MacPherson said.

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A new study led by the University of Colorado at Boulder indicates biologists trying to save Colorado’s native greenback cutthroat trout from extinction over the past several decades through hatchery propagation and restocking efforts have, in most cases, inadvertently restored the wrong fish.

According to a sophisticated DNA analysis, five of nine “relic” populations of what biologists believed to be greenback cutthroat trout living in isolated pockets of the state actually are Colorado River cutthroat trout, a closely related subspecies, said lead author Jessica Metcalf, a researcher in CU-Boulder’s ecology and evolutionary biology department.

The new study, which included sequencing and analyzing mitochondrial and nuclear DNA, showed the majority of the greenback populations had been misidentified, and that the greenback cutthroat trout range is now restricted to just 11 miles of streams in several remote areas of Colorado.

The misidentification likely was caused by the stocking of fish in the late 1800s and early 1900s when railroads delivered hundreds of thousands of baby trout around the state of various species and subspecies for people to stock in local waters, said Metcalf.

Although greenback cutthroats were declared extinct in 1937 — victims of mining pollution, fishing pressure and competition from other trout species — several small populations were discovered in tributaries to the Arkansas River and South Platte River drainages in the 1950s, she said. Greenback cutthroats were added to the federal list of endangered species in 1978.

State and federal fish managers began taking eggs and sperm from what were believed to be surviving populations of pure greenback cutthroats in the 1970s, rearing them in hatcheries and returning them to native cutthroat habitat. The habitat — small streams and lakes — had been cleared of non-native fish species to heighten survivability of the greenbacks, said Metcalf.

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When a Coney Island lifeguard spied a shark near an upset group of swimmers, he did what he thought was right: He rescued the fish.Marisu Mironescu, 39, said he was prompted to action Monday after seeing about 75 to 100 people circling the 2-foot sand shark off the beach and “bugging out.” “They were holding onto it and some people were actually hitting him, smacking his face,” said Mironescu. “Well, I wasn’t going to let them hurt the poor thing.”

He grabbed the largely harmless shark in his arms and carried it, backstroking out to sea, where he let it go. “He was making believe like he’s dead, then he wriggled his whole body and tried to bite me,” Mironescu said.

“We had a little bit of a punctuation mark at the end of summer with ‘Jaws’ junior showing up and frightening people,” said Adrian Benepe, the city Parks Commissioner.

The rescue ended a holiday weekend that began with another city shark scare Saturday, when a 5-foot thresher shark washed up on Rockaway Beach, sending hundreds of swimmers out of the water. About 10 blocks of the beach were also closed down for hours on Labor Day weekend.

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In Maine, when a lobsterman hauls in a trap, he looks up the lady lobsters’ skirts. If he finds a female laden with eggs, he grasps her appreciatively with one hand, and with the other, reaches for his knife. With two swift thrusts, he slices a tiny triangular nick out of one of the flippers on her tail. The nick is shaped like a V, so he calls it a “V-notch.” If you’re visiting Maine, this term can be used in a sentence, such as: “She has a real nice V-notch.”

When the lobsterman is finished cutting the notch, he gives his lady lobster a look full of longing, then slips her back into the sea.

Once she is notched, no fisherman can violate this lobster’s right to life - even if she isn’t bearing eggs next time she’s caught. She’s become a kind of fertility goddess, and the V-notch is her free pass to more procreation.

Outside of Maine, other lobstermen also toss back egg-bearing lobsters. But the peculiar act of marking a female lobster with a notch, to protect her beyond that initial pregnancy, is an invention unique to Maine’s craggy coast.

So yes, I do find these nicely notched females rather arousing.

That’s not simply because I’m excited by the idea of underwater hanky-panky. It’s also because I worked for a couple of years on a Maine lobster boat. I witnessed this V-notching routine regularly, sometimes several times a day. And I saw the results, both through my own eyes, and through the eyes of scientists studying the lobster population.

Thanks to V-notching, the floor of the ocean in the Gulf of Maine is teeming with gangs of large mother lobsters. Many factors affect the health of a fishery, but lobstermen in Maine can take pride that their fishery has not lacked for a supply of fresh eggs.

While stocks of other sea life have been obliterated by overfishing, the lobster fishery in Maine has thus far replenished itself and been a story of sustainability.

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The world’s river dolphin population is dying out thanks to bad environmental practices that also threaten the health of their human neighbours, an international environmental conference has been told.

The 10th annual Riversymposium, Australia’s largest river management conference, brings around 500 delegates from 40 countries to Brisbane from Monday to discuss river health, damming practices, drought and climate change.

WWF river dolphin initiative coordinator Anna Forslund said China’s Yangtze river, the Mekong river in Cambodia, the Ganges river in India and the Indus river system in Pakistan were among the world’s most endangered rivers as evidenced by their dwindling river dolphin populations.

Ms Forslund said many people had never heard of river dolphins, which were smaller than marine dolphins, had a longer snout and were often blind, but they were one of the most threatened species in the world with some populations now comprising between 1,000 to just a handful of wild creatures.

She said dolphin populations had been suffering from damming, overfishing, bad farming and mining practices, pollution and sewage since the 1970s. “You can see the link, river dolphins are dependent on the water and the people are dependent on the water so the levels of toxicity is probably the same in people living there - low levels of dolphins means unhealthy water,” she said.

Outgoing WWF global freshwater program director Jamie Pittock said the case study of river dolphins was bad news for humans. “They’re really the canaries of the rivers - if the river dolphin population is healthy then the river’s healthy,” Mr Pittock said. “Millions and millions of people, well they’re suffering now, and they’ll suffer even more if the dolphins go extinct because extinction of the dolphins means that the rivers are terribly polluted, there’s not enough water, fish are dying and people in these countries are drinking the water from these rivers.” He said many people did not realise humans were just as susceptible to the environment as animals.

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Civilised countries around the world have laws against the harassment of marine life. But it seems in Singapore, there is no such law.

In the Underwater World aquarium on Sentosa island in Singapore, there is a “Touch Pool” where visitors are encouraged to dip their hands inside “for some ‘hands on’ experience with starfish, stingrays and if you dare, baby sharks“.

Every day the stingrays and sharks have to swim for the lives with thousands of hands trying to catch or touch them. The stress alone could kill them and definitely shorten their lives, but the management of Underwater World seem oblivious to that.

There are even pufferfish which inflate on stress. And they can inflate only a few times in their lives because of the strain that engulfing water puts on their bodies. One wonders how many wild pufferfish that they have to buy every month to replace the ones that were killed from the strain.

To say nothing of the danger of putting your hand on a stingray which can whip its tail and slice off a finger or two when it senses danger.

Routinely, children are seen lifting the sea stars and sea cucumbers out of the pool, starving them of water. And when they are done with them, the sea creatures are not gently put back where they were taken from, but carelessly thrown back into the pool.

If you visit Singapore, tell other people about the Touch Pool. Stop visitors from harassing the marine life. Please link to this article.

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According to a statement from the Whale Watching Association of Iceland, the number of minke whales spotted in whale watching areas has dropped significantly since 2003, when the Iceland Marine Research Institute began whaling for scientific purposes.

The statement claims the Marine Research Institute has killed dozens of minke whales within designated whale watching areas despite the Ministry of Fisheries promising that no animals would be killed in these areas.

According to the statement, minke whales, which used to swim alongside whale watching boats, now tend to avoid them, destroying the experience of tens of thousands of tourists who whale watch.

The Whale Watching Association said in its statement that it celebrates the Minister of Fisheries’ Einar K. Gudfinnsson’s decision not to issue a new quota for commercial whaling for the upcoming fishing season since whale meat cannot be exported to Japan.

However, the statement says, the Association regrets the minister’s decision to renew the quota for minke whaling for the local market, which will further harm the whale watching industry.

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In a meeting Wednesday, Chile’s National Commission of Coastal Use voted to delay the establishment of a Protected Marine Coastal Area (AMCP) in the Gulf of Corcovado. This decision was made despite the Chilean government’s official approval of the proposal.

The area in question is a relatively new home for close to 200 migrating blue whales. The proposal seeks to declare 51,000 km of marine zone, in between the Chiloé and the Guaitecas Archipelagos of Regions X and XI, a protected area.

The Commission, presided by Minister of Defense José Goñi, chose to delay the validation of the proposal, and instead established a public board of representatives from each affected entity. The first board meeting will include members from CONAPACH, environmental groups, and the regional government, and is tentatively set for October.

Not all environmental organizations are supportive of the proposal for the establishment of the protected area. Some NGOS, like the Center for Cetacean Conservation and Ecoceanos, say that the true motives behind the proposed whale sanctuary have little to do with protecting the whales and more to do with future economic interest.

“It is simply a covert way to privatize an area only to open it up later for economic bids and development opportunities for the tourist industry,” said Juan Carlos Cárdenas, executive director of Chilean NGO Ecoceanos.

In fact, right alongside the proposed protected area south of Chiloé is Parque Tantauco, a pet project of businessman and presidential candidate Sebastián Piñera. Somewhat more disconcerting is the interest and involvement of Bernardo Matte, who has coordinated with other companies to support the establishment of the protected area. Matte is the president of electricity company Colbún.

The greatest evidence of economic interest over environmental concern in the protection of the area, according to Cárdenas, is that “the highest rate of blue whale sightings is near the island of Chiloé’s northeastern side and not in the Corcovado Gulf. This would leave nearly 60 percent of the blue whale population in Chile outside of the protected area.”

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Two town council members from the whaling town of Taiji have come out publicly against the feeding of dolphin meat contaminated with mercury to children in Japan’s school lunch programs. It is the first time that Japanese elected officials have broken the unwritten rule against criticizing whaling and the consumption of whale meat that prevails across the country.Independents Junichiro Yamashita and Hisato Ryono will be holding a news conference on Monday to announce laboratory test results of samples taken from dolphin meat purchased at local supermarkets. The meat was found to contain over 10 times the government’s limit for both mercury and methyl mercury.

The news conference comes as the annual dolphin drive hunt begins in Taiji. Conservationists around the world oppose the hunt, the largest kill of dolphins anywhere in the world, which takes place over six months beginning in September.

Yamashita said, “We’re not against traditional whaling, but we heard claims that pilot whales are poisoned with mercury, and we discovered that some of this meat from the drive fisheries was fed to kids in school lunches.”

The assemblymen described the dolphin meat as “toxic waste” and are attempting to persuade other elected officials in Taiji and surrounding towns to take it off school lunch menus.

Although the supermarkets immediately removed dolphin meat from their shelves after they were informed of the test results, the town of Taiji is moving ahead with plans to build a new dolphin processing facility while expanding the dolphin meat lunch programs to surrounding school districts, says Ric O’Barry of the advocacy group Save Japan Dolphins.

One Japanese newspaper has published an article about Yamashita and Ryono’s lab tests. On August 1, the “Japan Times” ran an article quoting Yamashita as saying the two council members at first did not believe the reports of contaminated meat, which came from western conservation organizations. “We tested some samples purchased at the Gyoko supermarket in Taiji and Super Center Okuwa in the nearby city of Shingu,” Yamashita said. The councilmen were “shocked” by the results.

“One dolphin sample had a mercury content 10 times above the health ministry’s advisory level of 0.4 parts per million, with a methylmercury readout 10.33 times over the ministry’s own advisory level of 0.3 ppm,” the article states. “Another dolphin sample tested 15.97 times and 12 times above advisory levels of total mercury and methylmercury, respectively.”

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Norwegian whalers caught just over half their quota of 1,052 minke whales in 2007, a small rise from last year, but hunters and their opponents dispute whether regulations or dwindling demand cut back the catch.

Norway and Iceland are the only nations to allow “commercial” whale hunts despite a two-decade moratorium on whaling by the International Whaling Commission. Japan catches hundreds of minke whales but says it is for scientific purposes.

“A total of 592 whales have been caught in 2007,” Harald Dahl of Norway’s fishing association said. That is an increase of 47 whales from last year, when 545 whales were harpooned.

Rune Sroevik, a spokesman for the High North Alliance, which represents whalers’ interests, said this year’s catch had been limited by government rules imposed after the season started.

“If this had not happened, I would estimate that about 200 more whales could have been caught,” Sroevik said, adding that weather had been good for this year’s hunt, which ended on Friday.

Area quotas were imposed on whalers after 165 of the marine mammals were caught at the start of the season. The regulations are in line with recommendations made in the early 1990s by the 77-member International Whaling Commission (IWC), the Ministry of Fisheries and Coastal Affairs said.

The area restrictions mean extra travel time for whalers to get to waters further off the coast. Hunters did not catch a single whale of a quota of 152 around the North Atlantic island of Jan Mayen, halfway to Greenland.

Environmental group Greenpeace, which condemns whaling, said declining demand explained why fewer whales had been caught than the quota set by the Norwegian government allowed.

“Whalers have been stopped by economic interest because there is no market for whale meat in Norway or elsewhere. Even if they could catch more … they chose not to,” said Truls Gulowsen, manager of Greenpeace Norway.

Sroevik said that despite the regulations, 2007 had still proved to be a better season than 2006 for the whalers. “Prices have increased, more volume has been caught. Weather conditions have been good compared to 2006,” he said. Dahl said the average whale meat price per kilo rose to 31.86 Norwegian crowns ($5.48) from 30.11 crowns in 2006 and was likely to end up above 32 crowns.

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