The Ocean of Life

by Callum Roberts

  Hanifaru, a coral ring on the eastern edge of Baa Atoll in the Maldives, is home to one of the great spectacles of nature. A ledge of coral traps and concentrates plankton as water pours in and out with the tide. When conditions of tide and plankton are right, dozens or even hundreds of manta rays glide in to feed. On a recent dive I was lucky enough to meet them.

  Nothing prepares you for the first encounter with a manta ray. As I swam over the lagoon, the white sand bottom dropped away and the water darkened. Dense swarms of copepods coursed around me, causing my skin to tingle as they zinged against my body. I had never seen plankton this thick before. To a manta, it was an irresistible soup. Ahead of me, a large crescent shape loomed from the murk, followed by another, then another. Six mantas in all, head to tail, their broad oval mouths gaping wide. A pale flash of belly caught my eye and, turning, I saw another ray, mid-cartwheel, curling back on itself to make the most of a rich patch of food. Others appeared as I watched, mesmerized by their effortless grace. Soon twenty rays circled below, around and above me in a swirling silent vortex of planktonic gastronomy. Monolithic and impassive, they seemed oblivious to my presence, and yet not a fin brushed me though I was in their midst. Two giants headed directly for one another but at the last moment veered upward, belly to belly, before turning backward. Another seemed certain to strike me on the downstroke of a wingbeat but delicately withheld the flap until it had passed by. The dance, for that is what it felt like, continued for an hour, until the last of the plankton had washed over the reef sill on the falling tide.

  Baa Atoll’s mantas are lucky, because they have a champion in the person of Guy Stevens. Guy is in his thirties, tall and lanky with sun-bleached hair that is usually wet from his latest dive. He spent years getting to know these mantas and soon found that every one had a unique pattern of black spots on its white belly. Since his discovery he has recorded over the course of ten thousand observations more than two thousand different rays, half of which visit Hanifaru.

  Manta rays are the largest of all stingrays, although they have lost their stings and have quit the seabed for life in open water. They are among the largest fish in the sea, with a wingspan up to twenty-three feet and weight of over two tons. For hundreds, perhaps thousands of years they have inspired awe and fear in those who have seen or imagined them. Few nineteenth-century books on ocean life were complete without a vivid description of some hapless pearl diver falling victim to a manta ray. But these were fanciful tales, as manta rays had more to fear from people than the other way around. Many mantas basking at the surface were speared and hooked for sport by adventurers. Great amusement was had in the early twentieth century by hunters chasing mantas off the Carolinas in America. Sometimes the rays outwitted their pursuers, towing their boats with effortless strength until the lines broke.

  Today fishermen have the upper hand. Commercial fisheries have developed for mantas in Indonesia, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, and Mexico, where thousands are landed every year. Elsewhere mantas are threatened by entanglement in longlines, capture in purse seine nets set to surround shoals of fish, and boat strikes. Guy Stevens’s efforts to protect mantas led to Hanifaru Bay being declared a marine reserve. Although Maldivians have never hunted mantas, Hanifaru was their favorite place to catch whale sharks (now also protected) that were valued for their livers and fins.

  Marine reserves can be useful for highly mobile species by protecting places where they aggregate, breed, and raise their young, and in bottlenecks along their migration routes. Caribbean lemon sharks spend their first two or three years of life in coastal mangrove nurseries—without them the sharks would decline. The Mexican lagoons used by gray whales were nearly the species’ downfall when whalers discovered them in the late nineteenth century, but protection in the 1970s helped boost numbers. In many places, salmon runs were virtually wiped out when nets were strung across river mouths as they returned from the sea to spawn. Close regulation of fishing on these migration highways has helped Alaska’s salmon to a vibrant resurgence. Turtles haul themselves onto the same nesting beaches time and again over long lives. Judicious protection of these places can help save these animals from harm. But marine reserves offer only part of the protection that the giants of the sea need.

  I recently came across a study that described efforts to reduce the bycatch from a longline fishery for mahi-mahi in Costa Rica that made my blood run cold. If you pay any attention to the sustainability of the fish you eat, you may know that mahi-mahi (also called dolphin fish or dorado) is considered a good choice. Mahi-mahi are supple-bodied gold-and-emerald fish spangled with blue that sport amid shoals of tiny fish wherever the sea is warm. They grow fast and reproduce early, so they are resilient to fishing. Retailers like to label their products with enticing words like “line caught in the clear waters of the Pacific,” conjuring images of a gallant figure pulling on a rod to swing a single fish into the boat—no bycatch, clear conscience. The reality is usually very different. With the exception of pole-and-line-caught tuna, line-caught mostly means longlines. They can be tens of miles long and carry thousands of hooks. The problem is they catch far more than the target species.

  The longline fishery in the study I am talking about was at Playa del Coco, and supplied mahi-mahi to America as well as more locally.1 The collateral damage from the capture of just 211 mahi-mahi, which took fifty-four longlines with forty-three thousand hooks, was atrocious: 468 olive ridley turtles, 20 green turtles, 408 pelagic stingrays, 47 devil rays (close relatives of the manta), 413 silky sharks, 24 thresher sharks, 13 smooth hammerhead sharks, 6 crocodile sharks, 4 oceanic whitetip sharks, 68 Pacific sailfish, 34 striped marlin, 32 yellowfin tuna, 22 blue marlin, 11 wahoo, 8 swordfish, and 4 ocean sunfish. To capture enough mahi-mahi to provide one lunch for five average-sized office blocks caused carnage in Costa Rican seas. What is even more disturbing is that this longline fishery had already switched to so-called turtle-friendly circle hooks! How friendly is that, hooking nearly five hundred turtles for two hundred mahi-mahi? Circle hook points are bent inward rather than upward as in the standard J-hook, so turtles are less likely to be hooked and fewer are gashed if they swallow the hook. But they often die nonetheless, as they tangle in the lines and drown.

  Turtles aside, what about the devil rays, the sharks, and the sunfish, the largest bony fish in the world about which we know almost nothing? The Playa del Coco fishery isn’t just bad, it’s absurd! It clearly isn’t possible for a longline fishery of this kind to be sustainable according to any reasonable meaning of the word. Yet this is just one example of the reckless slaughter that pervades the open sea. How many images do we have to endure of sharks having their fins hacked off, their still living bodies thrown back into the ocean before we do something about it? Next time you sink your teeth into a delicious mahi-mahi sandwich, spare a thought for the ghosts of all those others slaughtered to catch that fish. The ocean’s big animals need protection beyond the limits of protected areas. Otherwise it won’t be many years before this Costa Rican fishery and others like it close shop as there will be nothing left to take.

  While I’m on the subject of good seafood choices, let’s return to those “dolphin-friendly” signs I mentioned that most cans of tuna sport these days: You should know they are a little misleading. It all began in the Eastern Pacific, where pods of spotted and spinner dolphins associate with schools of yellowfin tuna. Fishermen found it easier to spot dolphins than tuna, so they began to set their nets around dolphin pods, in the process drowning or mangling in their winches tens to hundreds of thousands of dolphins every year. The United States banned the import of tuna caught using this method in 1990, so the fishermen changed their ways. Many still use dolphins to find tuna, but now they haul their nets in a way that lets them escape, assisted by swimmers who jump into the water to herd them out of the back of the net. Today “only” about five thousand dolphins are killed directly by the fishery every year. Of greater concern is the fact that populations of the two spec
ies of dolphins that have been targeted are not recovering. Their reproductive rates are down, which can probably be attributed to stress from monthly near-death experiences at the hands of tuna fishers.2 Calves may also be separated from their mothers in the confusion of fishing operations. Setting purse seine nets around tuna schools is a highly effective way of catching fish, but like long-lining it inflicts severe collateral damage.3

  In the past, when migrant animals left their seasonal haunts we could only guess where they went and what they did. For much of the twentieth century, our guesses were little better than the long-held belief, common in previous centuries, that swallows overwintered on the bottom of ponds. Now sophisticated electronic tags allow us to travel with them, often in real time. The sea is giving up its secrets, and we can use this revolutionary new understanding of the oceans’ biggest creatures to craft better ways to protect and manage them.

  The most ambitious tagging program, “Tagging of Pacific Predators,” is run out of Stanford, University of California–Santa Cruz, and the Pacific Fisheries Environmental Lab in California. Since 2000, this team has attached electronic tags to over two thousand animals, including seabirds, whales, sharks, turtles, sea lions, even squid.4 Tagged leatherback turtles in the eastern Pacific follow familiar paths from their nesting beaches to seasonal feeding grounds. These routes could easily form core areas for seasonal protection from the longline fisheries that have decimated them. Despite the name, the project also tags creatures in other parts of the world. They recently combined data from tagged bluefin tuna in the Gulf of Mexico with information about oceanographic conditions they experienced over the course of their migration to build a picture of preferred bluefin habitat. The findings show how fishermen who target other ocean-going predators like swordfish or yellowfin tuna could avoid places where bluefin are most likely to be present. The study showed that bluefin particularly like a region of the northwestern Gulf that was severely affected by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Since bluefin go to the Gulf to breed, this is worrying news.

  The four hundred northern right whales that migrate along the east coast of the United States and Canada transit some of the world’s busiest shipping lanes, and about one a year is killed by a boat strike. Satellite tags and arrays of underwater hydrophones now show areas where whales concentrate. In Canada, hydrophones listen out for these whales and warn ships to slow down and be more watchful when whales are close. They need to be careful, because calculations suggest that for the northern right whale species, the loss of even two females a year could tip the balance toward extinction.5

  Shipping is a major problem even in protected areas, as most allow the right of “innocent passage” to boats that is enshrined in the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary lies just above the hook of Cape Cod off the coast of New England. It was created mainly to protect the humpback whales that visit every summer to gorge on thick shoals of tiny fish and krill that flourish where cool and warm currents meet. I visited Stellwagen on a charter boat in 2001 to see the place for myself. The sea was steel gray with a low, rolling swell, but otherwise conditions were good, and we soon spotted columns of spray from blowing whales. There were seven humpbacks, and as we approached I was thrilled to discover they were bubble-net feeding. In this technique the whales blow a curtain of bubbles around a shoal of fish to ball them into a tight mass before rising through the middle to engulf them. All at once a group of mouths burst through the surface in cavernous liquid yawns, fish and water streaming from their barnacle-knotted brows. These whales would long ago have learned to tolerate whale-watching boats, but much bigger and more dangerous vessels cut through their world, as Stellwagen straddles the shipping lane in and out of Boston Harbor.

  More than thirty-five hundred ships transit through the Stellwagen Sanctuary every year, one every two and a half hours. To lessen the risk to whales, the shipping channels were narrowed and moved to avoid areas of highest activity, especially of northern right whales. The move is thought to have reduced the risk of ship strikes by 80 percent. To the north there has been a similar reorganization of shipping routes in and out of Canada. While welcome, this does little to reduce the shipping noise that occludes whale calls and breaks down social groups. When big ships pass through Stellwagen, the sanctuary is so filled with noise that there is little space left for whales to converse.

  I have been shocked by how rapidly populations of the seas’ largest and most majestic animals have declined in my lifetime. Leatherback and loggerhead turtles, most species of albatross, and almost all species of shark are down by 75 percent to more than 90 percent since the 1960s. Perhaps more enraging is how slow the world’s response has been, even when the causes are obvious and reversible. The collapse of Atlantic bluefin tuna has exposed an institutionalized inability to instigate measures that will allow the species to recover. Here the will of a conservation-minded majority of nations is subordinated to the will of a handful bent on business as usual, regardless of the consequences. International forums are usually constituted on an egalitarian basis, where every nation has an equal vote and decisions are made by consensus. If unanimity cannot be achieved, the measure fails. This setup gives excessive power to minorities and allows essential measures to manage the environment to be hijacked by self-interested groups.

  A perfect example of this took place at the UN General Assembly in 2006. On the table was a proposal to introduce a global moratorium on deep-sea bottom trawling. This fishing method is highly destructive to vulnerable seabed habitats, and its abolition had gained widespread support. The measure came within a whisker of being passed but was vetoed at the last minute by the Icelandic delegation. A nation of three hundred thousand people stymied the introduction of protection critical to the survival of deep sea life. I am a democrat, but that upset me. At some point we need to draw the line so that small minorities cannot torpedo the fate of the planet. The wildlife and environment of our children’s generation will be under even greater pressures than they are today. Although it won’t be easy or popular, reform is essential.

  Bodies like the United Nations often have a consensus decision-making process that gives equal weight to the view of nations, be they large or small, strong or weak. In many of the bodies I have seen at work, such as Regional Fisheries Management Organizations, the European Union, or the United Nations itself, important conservation measures would have gained approval if decisions had been made on a majority vote rather than needing full consensus. We would have an international moratorium on deep-sea bottom trawling, and Atlantic bluefin tuna would be on the road to recovery if we shifted to a majority vote.

  Of course majorities could always be gained by coercion or bribery, so decisions that weigh present greed or obstinacy over long-term responsibility would still be taken—it isn’t a cure-all. Here is an example. Horrified at the scale and speed of the decline in bluefin tuna and frustrated by the deadlock in the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas, a coalition of conservation-minded nations and environmental organizations proposed at a meeting in Qatar in 2010 that Atlantic bluefin tuna be added to the list of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES for short). CITES regulates international trade in things like elephant ivory in an effort to ensure endangered species are properly protected. Until 2010 it had never dealt with fish of high commercial importance, as there was a tacit agreement that these species were best left to fishery managers, which is what pro-fishing nations argued in Qatar. It seems strange that other delegations swallowed this idea, since the only reason for bluefin to be proposed was the serial ineptitude of fishery managers. Japan, which consumes more bluefin than any other nation, lobbied hard to keep it off the list. In a move that left conservationists and diplomats steaming with indignation, their delegation served bluefin tuna at a banquet and gave away earrings and necklaces made of red coral, another threatened species considered for the list and later thrown
out.

  Imagine that a country served up roasted Amur leopard or delicate fripperies of Miyako kingfisher with a Philip Island hibiscus garnish at a conservation conference. It was not a proud moment for Japan, and by these selfish acts they called into question the entire worth of CITES. There comes a point at which the world must rise above national hubris and unite to save the common heritage of humanity for the benefit of our own and future generations. Many felt that CITES was the place to do that; now they are not so sure. The scientific case for protecting bluefin tuna could not have been stronger, but it was voted down. Although majority decision making would shift the odds in favor of conservation, it does not automatically lead to better environmental decisions.

  I don’t have a perfect answer; both consensus and majority voting have drawbacks. The latter will be anathema to some and unsettling to smaller and poorer countries. What is clear is that we must reinvent the concept of social responsibility for a crowded planet. As the world has filled to capacity, the freeboard to exercise willful self-indulgence or flagrant waste or to produce pollutants that spill into the living space of others has shrunk. The world can no longer afford to accept decision making that puts selfish self-interest and short-termism ahead of consideration for fellow inhabitants of the planet, human or other, living or yet to come. At the global level we need a Charter for Nature—a Charter for Life—akin to the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Critics will no doubt be swift to condemn this as untenable in a world where human needs press ever harder. But a charter for wildlife is really a charter for human life and well-being. As Gaylord Nelson, a U.S. senator and the founder of Earth Day, once said, “The economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment, not the other way around.” He meant that we depend on the environment for everything. Governments rarely consider the supporting roles of marine life when they devise management strategies for the sea. That omission is beginning to cost us dearly as oceans are stripped of life, breaking down their capacity to provide things we take for granted, such as protection from storms and clean, healthy water. We see this in the rise of toxic red tides off the coast of the southern United States, fueled by polluted runoff that poison fish and people alike. We see it in the spreading dead zones and in the heaps of decayed seaweed that clog fishing nets in China and the Baltic, and the plagues of jellyfish that close resorts in the Mediterranean.