Increasingly meaningless
Two days ago, the gavel came down in an adjudication decision which may, more than any other recent hammer-strike, determine the future of fishing: The Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) officially bestowed its blue-and-white fish-check label to a massive factory operator that targets Antarctic krill.
This is not a good thing.
Antarctic krill are tiny shrimp-like crustaceans that cluster in vast multitudes (known as “blooms”) in the waters of the Southern Ocean. They form a critical building block in the oceanic food web: small fish consume the krill before being eaten themselves by seals, penguins, toothfish, and other animals. Krill are also a primary source of nourishment for migratory whales — in fact, the majority of the world’s baleen whales journey to the southern ocean to feed on krill and replenish their energy supplies after depleting their reserves during their mating and calving seasons.
While krill in their vast numbers do seem on the surface to be an “inexhaustible resource,” one would hope that, by this time, we have learned that this mindless assumption will never be accurate in regard to any of the inhabitants of our finite planet. There is no such thing as an inexhaustible resource. Ask any great auk or passenger pigeon, they’ll tell you.
Oh, wait — you can’t ask them.
Because there aren’t any left.
Because there’s no such thing as an inexhaustible resource.
Trouble bath
There are a few things that we are certain of about krill. The first is that the tiny animal, like many other sea creatures — especially crustaceans — is vulnerable to climate change, especially through the ocean acidification trends resulting from the rising levels of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. Nowhere in the Marine Stewardship Council certification system are the potential effects of climate change even discussed, let alone taken into account by the methodology. Strike one.
Next, we know that Antarctic krill exist in the Southern Ocean – an area adjacent to a land mass that is uninhabited by humans. The simple fact that we are sending fishing vessels into this area bespeaks an unsustainable paradigm, known as finite expansion. There is a certain amount of ocean on this planet. That we continue to fish farther, deeper, and longer simply underscores the fact that we are not approaching the management of our oceanic resources from a sensible and comprehensive standpoint that would account for the idea that one day – one day quite soon, actually – these fishing boats are going to bump up against the ice shelf. No more expansion. What then? The Marine Stewardship Council methodology again fails to even consider these perspectives, concentrating instead on discrete management techniques that do not consider the idea that sustainability is more than a fishery-by-fishery label – it is a way of looking at the world. Strike two.
Little critter, big mystery
Finally, we know that we have only a very rudimentary understanding these tiny animals. Krill have been studied only cursorily and we have almost no knowledge of their life history and behavior. It is irresponsible in the extreme to proceed with the certification of a fishery that is so cloaked in mystery – we have no idea what kind of damage we could be doing. Strike three.
And yet in the face of all these worries, the rubber stamp comes down and the MSC pronounces the krill fishery to be sustainable. Let’s not forget that vehement objections to this certification have already been lodged by the Pew Environment Group and the Antarctic and Southern Ocean Coalition. These objections were overruled — but let us not forget that the three strikes listed above were not taken into account in the decision, as they are simply not part of the MSC methodology… and if something isn’t part of the system, it apparently doesn’t have any relevance on reality. Or so the adjudication decision would lead one to believe.
In search of pink gold
There is a conceptual concern here too. The certification of this fishery gives an unofficial nod to the basic idea that vacuuming up the tiny life forms forming the foundations of the oceanic ecosystem is an acceptable practice. In reality, it’s not. Even the United States fishery management authorities banned fishing for krill in US waters, specifically to allow it to remain in the ocean as a food source for other organisms. Legitimizing and expanding Antarctic krill fishing is simply transferring our unceasing resource demand to a hitherto unrecognized protein source. This is not the way to move forward – in fact, pulling too hard on this loose yarn just might unravel the whole tapestry.
The certification of krill makes no sense. It’s a minuscule building-block animal on the other side of the world that simply doesn’t belong to us. We can’t even eat it – the krill will just be used to make oil, fish food, and other rendered products. And for this, we may end up short-changing whales, toothfish, seals, and other animals – all because the powers that be refuse to look at the entire issue from a larger perspective. Fishing for krill will not feed the world — but it just might end up starving it.
Tags: antarctica, asoc, bloom, certification, certified, council, greenpeace, krill, marine, msc, ocean acidification, PEW, seal, stewardship, toothfish, whale
The end is nigh
When the trials and tribulations of our modern age just get to be too much, people do different things to cope. Henry David Thoreau moved to Walden Pond. The Drifters went up on the roof. Kurt Cobain ate the business end of a shotgun.
Personally, when I find myself frazzled and worn down by this age of rampant overfishing and the pronounced abuse of our ocean, I want to grab Father Time by his cold little cajones and order him to turn back the clock to a simpler age.
Back in the good old days – and I’m talking about Biblical Egypt here – we didn’t have to worry about things like seafood sustainability and ocean conservation. It was enough to simply get through the day without being killed in battle, sacrificed to an animal-headed deity, or working your slaves to death while they built your pyramid.
We're here for the kamut
But this carefree Golden Age didn’t last forever. The ancient Egyptians eventually found themselves on the wrong side of an angry old-school God, who, in retaliation for the mistreatment that they had visited on their enslaved Jews, started pulling all sorts of nasty stuff out of his Bag of Lordly Vengeance.
Imagine the fear and confusion on the faces of the Egyptians when they found themselves smitten by one plague after another. These river-dwelling elitists woke up to find locusts in the fields, frogs in their houses, darkness at noon and boils all over their bodies (the Bible doesn’t mention this final affliction occurring right before the Prom, but I’m sure that God took advantage of the timing.)
I, for one, had hoped that all of this divine retribution had run its course. Unfortunately, 4000 years after Pharaoh let Moses’ people go, a plague with an undeniable Old Testament feel to it has struck the Western Pacific.
You can't be serious
The seas of Southern Japan are boiling with giant poisonous jellyfish. I’m not even joking about this.
Nomura’s jellyfish (echizen kurage in Japanese) is a formidable animal. Able to exceed six feet in length and grow to a weight of over 400 pounds, this invertebrate is no spineless wimp. These enormous cnidarians are massing in the East China Sea in greater numbers than ever previously recorded (even more than the great jellyfish invasion of 2005), forming a massive toxic flotilla that is gently drifting towards the Japanese coastline.
These humongous blobs are appearing in unheard of numbers. Recent surveys averaged their density at 2.41 jellyfish per 100 sqm (up from 0.01 per 100 sqm in 2008). And I’m not talking about square miles – that’s 2.4 jellyfish per 100 square meters.
Jelly jam
These jellyfish cause a whole litany of problems for the local fishermen. Not only do they devour any fish that gets too close to their gigantic tentacles (these lethal ropes are thicker than the internet cable that transmitted this article to your terminal), but they also are easily tangled up in fishing nets and sting any unfortunate soul tasked with removing them.
To make matters worse, it’s very difficult to fight back against these gelatinous monstrosities. Killing the jellyfish by disrupting its physical structure merely results in the creature releasing thousands of polyps that, if left to their own devices, will grow to become mirror images of their late predecessor. This is a good system for perpetuating the species, but a terrible problem to those who would eradicate it.
Jellyfish factory?
As of now, no one has carved in stone the reasons behind this infestation, but we can venture some guesses. Ocean acidification is a likely culprit: we continue to pump carbon into the atmosphere, which is captured by the ocean and, through a chemical process, lowers the pH of the seawater. This process, plus global climate change, have created warmer, more acidic surface temperatures in the ocean, which are ideal for incubating jellyfish. Moreover, our perpetual quest to remove the largest fish from the oceans and either plop them on our Weber grills or nail them to the billiard room wall has succeeded beyond our wildest dreams. With 90% of the oceans’ large predatory fish in severe decline, the jellyfish simply doesn’t have as many predators as it once did. Thus are these lovely but biologically primitive (and dangerous) animals running amok.
Sure, the driving force behind this jellyfish explosion may have more components than just those two aforementioned issues, but there is no doubt whatsoever that the overarching cause is anthropogenic. We did this. We have that kind of power.
Promised land
Through the way we have treated the planet, we have invited this scourge upon ourselves – and it is up to us to fix it. We must change our ways: decrease our fishing capacity to lessen overfishing, and reduce our carbon emissions to keep acidification at bay.
To save his people, Moses led them into the waters, which parted before him. We must realize that we, too, have tremendous control over the sea. If we are to save ourselves, we must no longer be slaves to a system that has our entire ecosystem careening out of control. We must find the courage to confront reality, and to cross this desert we have created.
Tags: 90%, carbon, egypt, exodus, japan, jellyfish, moses, nomura, nomura's jellyfish, ocean acidification, overfishing, pharaoh, predator
