Spain's fishy practices cast shadow on seas

A collection of Old fishing films from mark hardy

From BBC

Some quotes stay with you forever.

One that's stayed with me came from Rafael Centenera, a general assistant director in Spanish fisheries ministry, when I interviewed him in Vigo, Europe's busiest fishing port, in 2007.

"For sure we are friends of fish," he said.
"But still more, we are the friends of fishermen."

The reason these 16 words have stayed with me is that they encapsulate perfectly the approach to managing fisheries that has held sway for many years in most of Europe and indeed much further afield.

What it implies is that a bit of restraint and conservation is fine - so long as it doesn't get in the way of fishermen's profits.
What that stance implies in Spain has been laid out more clearly than ever in a new report from the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ).

According to their analysis, Spanish fishing has been subsidised to the tune of 5.8bn euros ($7.8bn, £5bn) since 2000.
Those subsidies have spanned the scrapping of old boats and the building of new ones, and just about everything in between.
And the number is so high that one in every three fish landed by Spanish boats is paid for in subsidy, ICIJ calculates.

To anyone who's familiar with the issues, the findings won't come as any surprise; but it is nevertheless striking to have the scale of the subsidies laid out so starkly.

Incidentally, on that same trip to Vigo, everyone connected with the industry claimed there were no subsidies, that everything had been ended.
One skipper then undermined the case by telling me how little he had to pay for his diesel.

The website fishsubsidy.org has also documented the scale of public support across the EU.
Among other things, it has produced a list of vessels that were first subsidised in renovation, and then in destruction.
In one Spanish example, money was awarded to the boat Mikel Deuna Primero for modernisation. Just 17 days later, more money was allocated for scrapping it.

The ICIJ report also mentions that fishermen found guilty of fraud or other offences have continued to receive subsidies.

And this theme is taken up in another new report, this time from Greenpeace.
It concludes that a single family of fishing barons has amassed about 16m euros in subsidies, despite a series of arrests and convictions for offences such as smuggling, illegal shark-finning and falsifying records.

Maria Damanaki, Europe's fisheries commissioner who's leading moves to reform the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP), says the accusations are being investigated.


World leader

Spain isn't the only country that supports its fishing industry with subsidies that in theory do not exist.

Ernesto Penas Lado, director of policy and enforcement at the European Commission's Directorate-General for Maritime Affairs and Fisheries, tells the ICIJ: "Spain has earned its bad reputation; the problem is others don't have the reputation, and deserve it just as much."

But if European fisheries are to be put on a sustainable footing, Spain is the key nation.
That's partly because it operates by far the bloc's largest fleet, and partly because it traditionally leads the process of political lobbying designed to ensure that authorities prioritise fishermen (at least, the big industrial companies that organise the lobbying) above fish in their hierarchy of friendship.

But there's a huge disconnect here; because ultimately, keeping fishing at unsustainable levels is anything but friendly to fishermen.

As the World Bank made clear a few years ago in its Sunken Billions report, the huge overcapacity of the world's fleets actually make the industry much less profitable, with about $50bn being poured into the sea every year.
Cutting the overcapacity and allowing stocks to recover will in the end make for a financially healthier proposition.
That's a reality that the authorities in Spain (and other countries) have routinely ignored.

The situation has barely changed in years, with changes wrought in long-term management plans for species such as cod just a drop in the ocean.
CFP reform - due to be completed in 2013 - is the biggest opportunity to put things right that there has been in years, and the biggest there is likely to be for many more.
Yet pressure for reform from the "usual suspects" such as Greenpeace frankly appears unlikely to bring about major change, because the pressure has been there for years and has pushed governments only a small distance.

So what might make a difference?

One window of opportunity could be the financial mess in which Spain finds itself - not on the scale of Greece, but mentioned whenever the "who's next after Greece?" question gets asked. Some of its economic indicators are around the European average, but 20% unemployment is anything but - the highest in the bloc, in fact.

If research is showing that cutting fishing capacity would increase revenues, why not demand Spain trims its industrial fleet as a condition for economic aid?
If that brings just one of the World Bank's sunken billions into Spanish ports every year, that's one less billion the rest of the eurozone would have to find.

The other window is surely provided by that unemployment figure.

An industry that favours big industrialised fleets with a powerful lobby over small-scale, artisanal operations is inherently less sustainable from an ecological point of view, because fishermen who do not have the capacity to move somewhere else when stocks are depleted are more likely to look after their fishing grounds.

It's also much worse socially.
Globally, artisanal fishing snares less than half the world's total catch, yet provides 90% of the jobs.

So a switch from large-scale industrialised fleets to small-scale localised effort would create employment, as well as increasing the chances of creating a more sustainable industry - which in turn means more profits down the line.

Sounds like a way to be a better friend to both fish and fishermen; but don't hold your breath.

Links :

• NYT : On subsidies, fish and fishing
• GreenPeace : the desctructive practices of Spain's fishing armada
  

Slew of whale deaths mystifies scientists

A 44-foot long dead sperm whale lay on a beach in Redcar, England (May 2011).
Rescuers were unable to save the whale, which washed ashore alive.

From TheGuardian

New theories are emerging: is global warming, shipping traffic, or the Earth's magnetic field to blame?

Wednesday's stranding and sad death of a 60-ft fin whale in the Outer Hebrides comes all too swiftly after what seems to be an unusually high number of unexplained whale mortalities this year – enough to puzzle any whale CSI forensics team.
On 8 September a stranded fin whale died off Cleethorpes beach; on 23 September another fin whale died on the Humber, followed on 29 September by a rare sei whale in the same estuary (although my own research shows this was by no means unique.
In 1888, a sei whale was harpooned and killed in the Solent, after following the Isle of Wight ferry from Portsmouth to Ryde).
This year, two separate pods of pilot whales stranded in the Western Isles.

Faced with yet another slumped and slowly expiring cetacean on the strand, scientists continue to be mystified by the cause for this run of whale casualties.
But slowly, some new clues and possible culprits are emerging.
Could global warming be to blame?
The food sources on which whales subsist prefer cooler waters, being better able to hold oxygen.
Noticeably warming waters may be driving whales, and their food, further north.

Other possible causes for whale strandings – suspected in the pilot whale strandings this year - include parasitical infection of the brain with trematodes, and morbillivirus infection, which has the same kind of effect as canine distemper.
Illness or other effects may cause the animals to become disorientated in their navigation.
Some scientists speculate that cetaceans set their "travel clocks" by detecting minute changes in the geomagnetic field.
Others hypothesise that the anomalies which may lead to strandings could even be created by solar activity known to affect the Earth's magnetic field – most visibly in the aurora borealis and australis.
Bad weather may also play its part: strandings increase during and immediately after storms.

Man-made problems may be to blame.
Noise from boats, ever louder shipping traffic, seismic surveys for oil and military sonar are known to have sometimes fatal effects on animals that rely so heavily on their sense of sound.
More insidiously, heavy metals, PCBs, DDTs and other organochlorines are entering the marine environment.
Whales, at the top of the ocean food chain, are the final repository for this toxic cocktail.

Sometimes they become the hapless victims of extraordinary combinations of all of these factors.
In one recent instance in the Mediterranean, a group of seven sperm whales were panicked, possibly by the use of military sonar in exercises, into entering waters too shallow for them to feed.
Weakened by thirst – whales get their water from what they eat, and so may die of thirst as they starve – the animals' internal systems began to break down their adipose fat in which these toxins were stored, relatively safely.
By releasing these toxins into their own blood stream, they were in effect poisoning themselves.
Finally the whales ran aground off Italy, where, like the fin whale yesterday, they succumbed to the sheer weight of their own bodies which crushed their internal organs.

Is this what is happening around Britain's shores?
As ever with whales, it is difficult to tell. Cetaceans spend all their lives in an environment which is alien to us.
Ironically, however, whale strandings can be remarkably helpful.
These deaths provide us with invaluable clues to the living animals about which we know so little.
A fin whale stranded in Denmark last year, for instance, was thought to be about 15-20 years old, a juvenile.
The results of its necropsy, released this summer, show that it was blind, arthritic, and 140 years old – thereby doubling, at a stroke, the known longevity of these animals.

Given that it is believed humpback whales may live to 150 years old, and bowhead and North Atlantic whales up to 200-300 years, their very lifespans defeat our scrutiny.
It is a salutary notion: whales may be simply too long-lived for us to study within our limited, human lives.

Links :

• BBC : Whale strandings: are we to blame?
  

Speculative polar cartography

high resolution scan of Mercator’s 1625 edition of his North Pole map

From RealClimate

The curious mismapping of Greenland’s ice sheet cover by the venerable Times Atlas recently has excited a lot of outraged commentary.
But few people noted that this follows an old tradition of speculative cartography of the polar regions.
‘Modern’ mapmakers as early as the 16th century combined real facts and scientific knowledge with fundamental misinterpretations of that knowledge to create speculative mappings of the world’s unknown shores – and nowhere was this more prevalent than at the poles.

Early cartographers had a particularly difficult time mapping the Polar Regions.
Factually, they based their maps on reports from mariners who dared sail the dangerous waters.
This was supplemented by information from earlier maps, speculations based upon their personal theories of geography, religious beliefs, and the fiscal and political ambitions of their patrons.

The earliest specific map of the North Pole is Gerard Mercator’s 1595 Septentrionalium Terrarum Descriptio (‘Northern Lands Described’, shown here is the 1606 edition).
Mercator interprets a lost work known as the Inventio Fortunata (“The Fortunate Discovery”), which, though we don’t know for certain, supposedly refers to early journeys to Iceland and the Faeroes in the 14th century.
Complementing and interpreting the Inventio, Mercator added real geographic knowledge collected by explorers Martin Frobisher (1535-1594) and John Davis (1550-1605) (amongst others).
Mercator used the Inventio description of lands and peoples, Frobisher and Davis’s reports on currents, ice extent, and other elements, to compose this masterpiece of cartographic speculation.

At the North Pole Mercator placed a great mountain, the Rupes Nigra (“Black Rock”) around which flows a mighty whirlpool (hence the strong currents recorded by Davis and Frobisher).
From here four powerful rivers flow inward dividing a supposed Arctic continent into four distinct lands.
Mercator referenced the Inventio to populate these lands with pygmies, Amazons, and other anomalies.
Between Asia and America Mercator added another great sea mountain to which he ascribes magnetic properties.
This mountain evolved from a pet theory devised by Mercator to explain magnetic variation.
It is also noteworthy that the seas all around the poles are open and navigable – it is very likely Mercator had in mind the interests of royal patrons eager for a Northwest or Northeast Passage.

Two hundred and fifty years later, in 1763, the French geographer Phillipe Buache (1700-1773), issued another wonderful attempt to address the problematic Polar Regions.
Buache drew this map to expound upon his own theory of water basins wherein he hypothesized that the Antarctic contained two distinct land masses separated by a frozen sea.
From the frequency of icebergs seen by early explorers such as Halley and Bouvet, Buache presumed that there must be a semi-frozen sea at the South Pole.
This sea, which he argued (correctly) could only be fed by mountains in the surrounding polar lands, disgorged ice into the southern seas.
He thus maps “Land yet undiscovered” and “Frozen Sea as Supposed”, “Supposed Chain of Mountains” as well as other speculations.
In order to conform not only to his own theories but to accepted mappings of this region by venerable cartographers of the 16th and 17th centuries such as Kaerius and Orteilus, Buache also joins New Zealand to the Antarctic mainland and adds an expansive reservoir he names “Siberia”.
Buache was highly influential in his time and aspects of his geographical speculation found their way into numerous maps of the period.

1763 Buache Map of the Antarctic Continent or South Pole (hi-resolution)

Maps such as these abound in early cartography and most, no matter how misguided, are genuine attempts to rectify the known and unknown.
Some, like the maps above and the more contemporary Times Atlas’ map of Greenland, are derived from real scientific knowledge, but exhibit either a misunderstanding of geography or an erroneous hypothesis.
These often lead to fictitious interpretations of factual data.
Such errors do have ramifications.
In the early days of polar exploration such maps often inspired to ill-fated nautical expeditions in search of pygmies, polar seas, and new lands.
In modern times, such speculative mappings, both early and contemporary, have been used by some to disprove global warming, advocate for the continent of Atlantis, and prove that space aliens mapped the earth in antiquity.

It should therefore probably be always borne in mind that cartography has always been a blend of art and science – which of course is one of the reasons why it so fascinates us.

Red tide surfing San Diego 2011 bioluminescence

Red Tide Surfing San Diego 2011 Bioluminescence from Loghan Call

While the great North has their natural neon phenomena known as the Aurora Borealis, San Diego, California, has its own water-based version.
The ocean glow is known as Red Tide and appears when billions of decaying single-cell organisms rapidly accumulate in a given water column, particularly on the coast.

During the day it makes the water a rust color, but it's durning the darkness that the real spectacle takes place.
When the sun goes down, the organisms produce a brilliant blue neon glow.
The bioluminescent waves look as if they have an electricity coursing through them.
Luckily, there's no radioactive elements here, just mother nature producing yet another awesome sight.

The cool natural phenomena has been generating a ton of Youtube traffic and spawned a flood of amateur San Diego filmmakers, including surfers and kayakers whose sports have carved the neon ocean and left bright blue trails behind.

Check out these Red Tide videos showing of a bioluminescent Pacific Ocean.
This is a movie shot in Encinitas, Carlsbad and Oceanside, depicting a bioluminescent red tide that has been present in the coastal waters off San Diego.
This particular species is called Lingulodinium Poleyedrum and emits a bright neon blue color when disturbed.

Rules, charts failed to stop grounding

On the rocks: M/V Rena, the 236-metre vessel stuck 'hard and dry' on the reef

From NelsonMail

Even before the 47,230 ton container-ship Rena ploughed into Astrolabe Reef, all shipping had been formally warned to stay clear of the promptly marked feature.

But as long as ships have sailed the seas, they have been hitting well recognized hazards - often for the most puzzling reasons.

The latest edition of the New Zealand Nautical Almanac, published by Maritime New Zealand, contains a chapter on shipping routes around the New Zealand coast, noting "mandatory areas to be avoided by all ships over 45 metres in length/500 gross tons".
Rena should have had the Almanac on its bridge - either electronically or in hard copy - and for Tauranga there is an explicit note for vessels coming to the port from the east, as Rena was.
"Keep at least 5 nautical miles to the north of Volkner Rocks, thence 3 nautical miles to the north of Astrolabe Reef and thence to the Pilot Station," the Almanac orders.

Online vessel trackers show Rena, prior to hitting the reef, was traveling about 17 knots (32kmh) - an average speed for a ship that size.
Ominously the same trackers show the grounded Rena is still moving at just under a knot - suggesting she is grinding herself into Astrolabe.
How the ship could hit a reef only 80 meters wide and noted on charts since 1827 is unknown at the moment, but there is no shortage of speculation over what might have happened at 2.20 am on Wednesday.

Under International Maritime Organization (IMO) rules a bridge watch would have been in place, but the actual driving of the ship would have been under electronic control.

Rena, coming out of Napier, was less than hour out from picking up a Port of Tauranga pilot and would have been preparing to change course to the south and slow down.
Rena may have had greater manual control that in normal seagoing.

The IMO has commission numerous studies over the last decade on "fatigue in the shipping industry" with one asking whether collisions and groundings can be linked to fatigue and the shift system used on ship watches.
While studies have concluded fatigue plays a role, dealing with it has proven elusive so far.

Last year a Chinese coal carrier, Shen Neng 1, hit one of the best known marine hazards in the world - Australia's Great Barrier Reef. (see GeoGarage blog)
The ship was badly damaged but was saved by Danish salvage firm Svitzer - who yesterday were put in charge of saving Rena.
Shen Neng's owner and skipper were fined, but preliminary investigations indicated fatigue was the major contributor to the grounding.

Svitzer, part of the giant Maersk shipping group also saved the grounded coal ship Pasha Bulker, which ended up on a beach in front of Newcastle, New South Wales in 2007.
Its Japanese owners paid for the damage after the ship was saved, but the New South Wales government ended up not prosecuting because they could not find the grounding was a result of negligence.
A storm warning had been posted at the time and many of the vessels waiting to load had put out to sea.
Pasha Bulker's captain had been off the bridge having breakfast at the time of the warning, and the bridge watch failed to warn him of it.

Groundings are often associated with equipment failure - either in engines or in navigation equipment on the bridge - but the best known case in New Zealand maritime history remains an intriguing mystery.

It involved the Soviet Union cruise ship Mikhail Lermontov on the night of February 16, 1986, sailing up Queen Charlotte Sound, out of Picton.
Local Captain Don Jamieson was piloting the large ship out but at Cape Jackson, for inextricable reasons, he decided to take a short cut between a light and the coast.
He appeared to believe the passage was much wider than it was.

>>> geolocalization with the Marine GeoGarage <<<

Traveling at 15 knots the ship hit rocks and was holed.
It struggled around to Port Gore where Jamieson tried to beach her, but instead it sank.
A crew man died.
As one of the world's more accessible wrecks it has attracted divers - and three are known to have died in it.
At the time the Anzus Alliance was collapsing and Lermontov's sinking prompted one of Prime Minister David Lange's quips, saying New Zealand was "the only nation to sink a Russian ship since the Second World War".
In an intriguing aside, Moscow sent a delegation to New Zealand soon after the sinking and among its members was a young KGB agent, now Russia's leader, Vladimir Putin - although he has steadfastly refused to acknowledge he has seen more of New Zealand than he should have.

Even the Royal Navy has had the embarrassment of hitting well-known rocks.
In 2002 destroyer HMS Nottingham hit Wolf Rock off Lord Howe Island in the Tasman Sea and came close to sinking.

>>> geolocalization with the Marine GeoGarage <<<

The rock had been on charts since 1837.
Its captain said the accident was the result of "a combination of unfortunate circumstances and human error".
In naval circles the incident was put down to a blunt pencil.
The ship had been waiting to land its helicopter and was maneuvering in the vicinity of the rock as the navigator continued to plot tracks on a paper chart.
At some point he drew a course across the map with the pencil and because it was blunt, the mark obscured the rock reference. Murphy's Law kicked in.

In 1998 the Royal Caribbean cruise ship Monarch of the Seas grounded on a coral reef off St. Maarten.
Investigations found the crew had failed to update ships charts to show a buoy marking the reef.
But it was also found that the captain at the time was suffering "a vicious bout of diarrhea" and had left the bridge at the crucial time.

Even Cunard's Queen Elizabeth 2 has hit charted rocks, when she ran around in 1992 off the coast of Martha's Vineyard in the US.

>>> geolocalization with the Marine GeoGarage <<<

The shoal, discovered in 1939, was described as being 39 feet deep - which should have been fine for QE2 drawing 32 feet.
After the incident, in what was described as a failure in "hydrographic standards", it was found the shoal was 30 feet deep.
Investigations also opened insights into the "squat effect" which occurs when a vessel moves quickly through shallow water.
It makes the ship squat lower in the water than otherwise expected.