Black Sea

by Neal Ascherson

  The Danube delta still survives. Claudio Magris in his book Danube describes it as 'an exuberance of plants and animals, reeds and herons, sturgeon, wild boar and cormorants, ash-trees and cane-brakes, a hundred and ten species of fish and three hundred species of bird — a laboratory of life and the forms of life'. Yet its escape has been narrow. The late Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu planned to drain the delta, fell all its vegetation and replace it with rice-paddies.

  It was in the early 1980s that Soviet marine biologists trawled up a creature unknown to them. It was an unimpressive little being, a bell-shaped thing of transparent jelly found swimming in the shallow waters of the north-western shelf. The scientists recognised that this was a species of ctenophore, an organism not unlike a jellyfish, and within a few months they identified it as Mnemiopsis leidyi, a native of the shallow estuaries on the Eastern Seaboard of the United States. Pretty clearly, it had been brought to the Black Sea in the water-ballast of freighters.

  As Black Sea people know only too well, a weakened polity attracts invaders who can settle without meeting resistance. They find a niche, and flourish. Much the same applies to ecologies. Mnemiopsis was not the first alien settler in waters whose natural defences — the biological diversity of other species — were in steep decline. The big marine snail Rapana, probably brought from its home in the seas off Japan in the same way, had already decimated the Sea's oyster stocks before itself becoming the target of a profitable fishery. But nobody was prepared for the consequences of Mnemiopsis.

  In the late 1980s, mostly between 1987 and 1988, there took place one of the most devastating biological explosions ever recorded by science. Mnemiopsis, an animal with no known predators to control it, spread suddenly and incontinently through the Black Sea. It fed voraciously on zooplankton, the food of young fish, and on fish larvae. In the Sea of Azov, Mnemiopsis consumed almost the entire zooplankton population, which in 1989 and 1991 collapsed to one-six-hundredth of its normal average. Its total biomass in the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov reached 700 million tons of translucent jelly, and its impact was entirely catastrophic. No recorded destruction by human pestilence or locust swarm compares with this damage to fish and their resources, and that was only the most obvious part of the disaster. Zooplankton feed upon phytoplankton which, liberated from their normal predators, multiply uncontrollably into the vast 'blooms' which consume dissolved oxygen and destroy life in shallow waters.

  The Mnemiopsis disaster, more than anything else, finally convinced the governments of the Black Sea states that they must take action. A series of international conferences, guided by United Nations agencies, is now trying to draw up detailed rescue programmes to cut back pollution discharges and face the consequences of overfishing. But Mnemiopsis itself, with no known natural enemies, is also immune to governments. Nobody knows what to do about it. One radical school of thought holds that the breakdown of the old Black Sea ecosystem has to be accepted as irreversible, and that the only hope now is to introduce other alien species selected to prey on these invaders - fish, jellyfish, ctenophores and molluscs — and eventually construct a new but stable ecological balance. Other scientists regard this as reckless, and prefer to concentrate on slow but predictable measures like the reduction of nutrients coming down-river.

  Meanwhile, unexpectedly, a change has come over the Mnemiopsis hordes. Like some of the nomad invaders of the Pontic Steppe who ran out of grass for their horses and set off for fresh pastures, Mnemiopsis appears to have eaten the Black Sea bare. The total biomass is thought to be falling. In some areas, the creature is descending to greater depths, closer to the oxycline, and attacking the tiny organisms which until now have survived as the main food of Black Sea sprats. More ominously, outlying raiding parties have begun to turn up in the Sea of Marmara and even off the Aegean coast of Turkey. Mnemiopsis is heading west. The spectre arises of an annihilating plague breaking out in vulnerable parts of the Mediterranean: the Nile delta, the Tunisian coast, even the Gulf of Lyon off Marseille.

  Appalling difficulties confront any programme for saving the marine life of the Black Sea. One of them - the most pathetic - is the bankruptcy of science in the countries of the former Soviet Union. All round the coasts of Ukraine and southern Russia, from Odessa and Sevastopol to Kerch, there once stood a chain of magnificent institutes of marine biology and oceanography. Their standards of research, not only in the Black Sea but in the oceans, were as high as any in the world, and their equipment - above all their fleet of specially fitted ships — was the envy of their Western colleagues. As far as knowledge of the Black Sea went, no other country could match the expertise built up through more than a century's work by Russian and then Soviet scientists.

  At exactly the moment when awareness of the desperate situation in the Sea began to dawn on the world, this magnificent and indispensable resource was paralysed by financial collapse. In Russia, money for almost all public scientific bodies — for scientific salaries as well as for research — dried up to a mere trickle at the end of 1991. In Ukraine, the research institutes funded by the old Soviet Academy of Sciences in Moscow were transferred to the Ukrainian government, which had no budget to carry their programmes forward.

  In Odessa, I visited the Scientific Centre for Marine Ecology, which used to specialise in research on the open oceans. Its concrete tower near Langeron Point had become a place of ill-concealed despair. The centre's six ocean-going ships and the two smaller vessels for Black Sea exploration swung uselessly at their moorings, unable to sail for lack of fuel. Two of its laboratories had already closed. In the others, little work was going on. The assistants sat watching football on black-and-white television or making tea in kettles plugged into the adaptors of Finnish-made computers; a cat lay yawning on a cupboard which proved to contain old cardboard portraits of Brezhnev and Andropov.

  In the midst of this desolation, scientists with dazzling records and qualifications were shuffling through the data of their past expeditions and experiments. They were concentrating on the last area for which there was any kind of official support: studies of the ecology of the Black Sea coastal shelf. Their devalued salaries now barely kept their families alive. Their foreign contacts which had kept them abreast of work abroad had been severed. Their careers seemed to be over, unless they had the luck to be headhunted by some laboratory in America or Western Europe.

  Some showed that soldierly devotion to science, that monkish indifference to physical hardship and official abandonment, which I had met among archaeologists in Russia and Ukraine. Others appeared close to nervous breakdown. Later, I heard that the ships had been leased out for shopping voyages, hired by private 'suitcase businessmen' heading for Turkey to buy clothing, blankets and food which they could resell in street markets at home. In June 1994, according to the Washington Post, 27 out of the 40 ships which once formed the Black Sea research fleet of the Soviet Union were docked at Istanbul. It is not science, but at least it is income.

  A second obstacle to the rescue of the Black Sea's ecology is the attitude of Turkey. Among all the causes of the Black Sea crisis, the most direct and obvious is overfishing. Species after species is being wiped out, or reduced to a few insignificant survivors, by genocidal and shortsighted greed which pays no attention to warnings about fish stocks until catch numbers and average weight have fallen below the point of no return. Most of the overfishing is done by Turks. This is a demonstrable fact, but a fact which Turkish fishermen, politicians and even scientists find almost impossible to admit. Ignorance, and the crude spoils-system of Turkish regional politics, contribute to this reluctance. But the most powerful motive is patriotic resentment. Once again, the outside world is perceived to be picking on Turkey and meddling in Turkish internal affairs.

  Professor Mehmet Salih (^elikkale, a bouncy, fair-haired figure, is Turkey's most prominent expert on fish stocks. One unbearably hot afternoon in summer, I made my way up the hill above Trabzon to see him at the Black Sea Technical University. H
e does not deny that overfishing is in some degree to blame for the collapse of species, especially for the disappearance of the hamsi and bonito. But he is unwilling to make the Turkish fishing industry the main culprit. For Professor (^elikkale, pollution on the northwestern shelf where the fish breed is the real problem, and here he accuses the Western European states above all - the European Union, which Turkey so desperately longs to join - of neglecting their responsibilities to clean up the Danube. Turkey, he protests, has taken steps to limit fish catches off the Anatolian coast, but the 'international community' is unwilling to invest in a fund to compensate the fishing villages for their losses -money which a poor country like Turkey cannot afford.

  The professor also claims that there are too many dolphins in the Black Sea. In the 1950s, when Turkey began intensive dolphin fishing, there were about a million of them: common dolphins, bottle-nosed dolphins and harbour porpoises. By 1983, when the anguish of foreign environmentalists persuaded Turkey to ban the fishery, they had been reduced by anything between two-thirds and a half. Professor Qelikkale believes that there were about half a million dolphins left by 1987, which other scientists consider a large over-estimate (the Russians, who did a survey in the same year, put the figure at between 60,000 and 100,000). He claims that they eat no less than a million tons offish a year and are increasing at the rate of 40,000 annually: two more figures regarded with scepticism by other marine biologists, who would divide this figure for fish consumption by about four. The Qelikkale appeal for a 20 per cent cull of dolphins, to restore the sprat and hamsi stocks, is not taken very seriously outside Turkey.

  The Turkish fishermen are not just predators. They and their families are victims too. When I went to the fish-market at Trabzon, it was almost deserted, its slabs bare except for a few mullet, a spiny turbot (once common, now rare) and boxes of farmed rainbow trout. East of Trabzon, where the dark-green mountains come steeply down to the sea, the fishing-boats are pulled up along the shore and men sit all day in the tea-houses. They are paying the penalty for crude and short-sighted planning which has achieved exactly what it set out to prevent: the ruin of their livelihood.

  As population increased along the coast, and the subdivision of peasant farms by inheritance led to growing land hunger, the Turkish government decided to make fishing more profitable. A programme of generous loans and grants - financed with the help of foreign investors, including the World Bank - made it possible for villagers to buy or build larger boats, equipped with new fishing and fish-locating technology. At first, all went well. The catch rose amazingly. Fortunes were made, especially by the fish-meal companies set up to take advantage of the new finance.

  Then, in the 1980s, the whole project began to slew off course. Fish numbers fell away, and the average size of fish declined sharply. As the hamsi and bonito became scarcer, so ever more expensive and sophisticated electronic gear was required to find them. The cost of an effective boat began to soar out of reach of most Black Sea fishermen, while the interest charges on loans ruined family after family. Politicians tried to keep their grip on the Black Sea vote by promising higher levels of grant, even by encouraging boat owners to fish illegally and out of season. But the disaster continued to deepen, as society in the little ports and fishing-harbours divided in a desperate struggle between the precariously rich and the chronically poor. The big-boat owners fell back on the most reckless and destructive fishing methods to meet their debts. The small-boat people, many of whom had owned larger vessels during the boom but had been driven bankrupt, saw their last chance of a living, the remnants of the fish stocks, being plundered away by crews with more powerful engines and larger nets.

  There was hatred, and even violence. But this is a trap from which there is no escape. The big boats have to go on fishing, even though the stocks are so near extinction that few ever make a profit: it is that or ruin and emigration. The owners of the small boats now set nets all winter for a few whiting or mullet a day; it is that or hunger. The Turkish government, with some justice, asks why bodies like the World Bank are not ready to pay to repair the damage which they helped to create a few years ago.

  But this, for once, is not a story special to the Black Sea. It is a tragedy as familiar to fishing communities in Norway or Peru as it is in Turkey, and the heavy word 'over-capitalisation' conceals the crudity of its plot. A government encourages the murder of fish species merely to win a respite from social pressures. A state, anxious to be popular, pays a whole deluded human community to set out on a journey which starts from one sort of poverty and must end in another. In the Black Sea region of Turkey, this journey lasted some thirty years. Now the people are back more or less where they started, but the fish have gone.

  Behind all predictions of what will happen to the Black Sea, there creeps a nightmare. It is a possibility so terrible that most scientists prefer not to discuss it. Many of them — to be fair — have brought forward good reasons to argue that it need not be taken seriously. It is a Black Sea apocalypse.

  This nightmare is known by the harmless word 'turnover', a phenomenon which has been observed and studied in lakes whose depths are anoxic and charged with hydrogen sulphide. 'Turnover' means a sudden rolling-over of water layers, as if the whole balance of pressures and densities which had kept the heavier mass below the lighter, fresher mass were reversed and overthrown. With 'turnover', in some lakes an annual event which takes place in autumn, the deep and poisoned waters burst through to the surface, annihilating all life.

  It is possible to define the Black Sea as merely the biggest of all anoxic lakes. If 'turnover' were to take place in the Black Sea, it would be the worst natural cataclysm to strike the earth since the last Ice Age, more devastating in its human consequences than the eruption on Thera in about 1500 BC which destroyed the Minoan cultures, or than the Krakatoa eruption in Indonesia in 1883.

  A first warning sign would be a rise of the anoxic water-level. A few years ago, American researchers on a study voyage in the Black Sea claimed that the oxycline, the upward limit of the poisonous undermass, had risen by thirty metres in only twenty years. Pollution and the effett of reduced river flows on the Sea's water-density, they concluded, were beginning to create the conditions for the ultimate disaster.

  They were probably wrong. Russian oceanologists at once pointed out that they had been measuring the oxycline level for far longer than the Americans, and had registered variations of up to thirty metres upwards and downwards since they began surveys some seventy years before. The British marine environmentalist Laurence Mee, who runs the Global Environment Facility task force for the Black Sea at Istanbul, calculates that the rivers would have to run at half their present flow for more than a century before the density balance of the Sea could be seriously affected. All this is reassuring; the weight of scientific evidence suggests that the Black Sea is not about to capsize. But, as Mee allows, 'the debate continues'. An edge of fear, a shadow of apocalypse, has entered all discussions on the rescue of the Black Sea, and it will never quite go away.

  Change cannot be avoided, but man-made disaster sometimes can. As I came to know better some of the scientists and politicians concerned with the Black Sea, I noticed that those with most experience were also those least ready to issue melodramatic forecasts of doom. To be truly familiar with the Sea is to appreciate the resilience - sometimes almost inexplicable - of its ecological system. The crisis is real enough; the damage done in the last few decades by pollution, overfishing and the reduction of river flows is so great that much of it cannot be reversed. But it was always wrong to think of 'restoring' the Sea to its previous status quo. A natural ecosystem is not eternal and static, but a process of continuous change and adaptation. Currents alter their direction; fish vary their migration routes. New and intrusive species do not need transport by ships' water-ballast but in the past were brought in by freak winds or by birds, to exterminate existing life-forms and upset an older ecological balance. Until now, the Black Sea and its marine
life have been able to absorb these impacts and arrange them into a new and different equilibrium.

  The Black Sea has not yet lost this power. There have been a few seasons in recent years when the Don River was allowed to flow with its old freedom through the Tsimlyansk dam; sturgeon and shad ran up the Don again to breed, and there were astonishing revivals of fish stocks in the Sea of Azov. Some new surveys suggest that damage by Mnemiopsis to the zooplankton mass on the northwestern shelf is much less in some areas than scientific projections suggested. This cannot easily be explained, but the Bulgarian biologist Violeta Vasileva said to me in Odessa, 'We were astonished at the way in which the ecosystem had rebalanced itself. I now feel that the Black Sea has far more fight-back capacity than I used to think.' Fishing restrictions in Turkey are beginning to produce a rapid climb in hamsi numbers, rather to the alarm of conservationists who worry that the boats will put to sea again before the recovery is complete and once more push the species to the verge of extinction.

  Even the economic slump which ran round the Black Sea after the collapse of the Communist systems has brought unexpected relief. The closing of factories and the new, prohibitive costs of imported fertilisers and chemicals have made the big rivers temporarily cleaner, and slowed down the eutrophication of coastal waters. In Abkhazia, the sewage treatment plants at Sukhum were blown up during the 1993 war with Georgia, but so many of the inhabitants have fled that the sea off Sukhum's beaches is purer than it has been for twenty years.