Hawksbill turtle

Two years after their detainment, 13 poachers, from Vietnam, who were caught with the dead bodies of 101 endangered Hawksbill turtles (known in scientific circles as Eretmochelys imbricata) near El Nido, northern Palawan, in the Philippines, have finally been convicted and sentenced to hefty fines along with some jail time.

On the 22nd of June, The Regional Trial Court of Puerto Princesa, Branch 50, after much deliberation, decided that the Vietnamese poachers should face jail time for their heinous acts, and will receive anywhere from 6 to 18 months, plus have some hefty fines to pay.

Since the poachers have been sitting in jail since the 2nd of September 2008, the court also decided that they will only have to cough up the money for the fines.

Two Filipino gunboats apprehended the Vietnamese boat transporting the poachers five miles east of Cabaluan Island near El Nido on August the 29th 2008. In a sheer act of desperation, the 13 crew members aboard the boat tried to sink her by flooding the holds, however were preented from doing so by law enforcement officers.

When the cargo holds were explored, they discovered the corpses of 101 Hawksbill Turtles, classified as being critically endangered, which is the highest risk rating for any living animal. This rating was handed down by the IUCN, the International Union for Conservation of Nature, some time ago.

So, they did the crime, they served the time, now all that remains is for them to pay the fine… Although, is it really enough? Did the poachers learn their lesson? Or were they simply sorry they were caught?

No less than 215 anglers from throughout the UK participated in the 2009 Scottish Sharkatag organised by the Scottish Sea Angling Conservation Network (SSACN).

The Sharkatag had three goals:

– To highlight the perilous state of the endangered shark species.

– To gather data to support claims for their protection.

– To press politicians and fisheries managers to recognize the needs of the sea angling community and its contribution to the Scottish economy.

The information gathered during the Sharkatag will feed into SSACN’s Scottish Shark

Tagging Programme; a program dedicated to broaden our knowledge of shark, skate and ray stocks in Scottish coastal waters.

Attending anglers caught, tagged and released various shark species from boats, kayaks and the shoreline of Solway in South West Scotland, and what they found was worse than expected.

“It really worries me that many of the tope packs have failed to

show this year“, says Ian Burrett, SSACN’s Project Director. “The whole region seems to be void of the expected male breeding stock and the fish caught were mostly immature females, typically under twenty pounds and a few solitary females in the 50-60 pound range; Luce Bay was especially poor for the time of year.”

The Tope shark (Galeorinus galeus), also known as the School shark, Soupfin shark and Snapper shark, is a type of hound shark found at depths down to 550 metres (1800 feet). It can reach a length of 2 metres (6.5 feet) and is listed as Vulnerable at the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species.

The situation was equally worrisome for several other species of shark and ray.

“Around two hundred tope, smoothhound and bull huss were tagged over the three days and that can only be described as poor compared to what the total should have been, says Burrett. “Combined with the lack of rays tagged, only three throughout Sharkatag, it shows how urgently plans are needed to helpprotect and regenerate the stocks. Twenty year ago virtuallyevery boat would have recorded several mature tope and rays.”

You can find more information at the Scottish Sea Angling Conservation Network’s website www.ssacn.org and the website of SSACN’s Scottish Shark Tagging Programme www.tagsharks.com.

Scientists tagging sharks off the Irish coast have tagged a surprisingly high number of Basking sharks this year: 50 specimens in just three days.

“I would normally expect to be lucky if we tagged 50 in a whole year,” said Dr Simon Berrow of the Irish Whale and Dolphin Group.

Basking SharkA record

Together with National Parks and Wildlife Service conservation ranger Emmett Johnston, Dr Berrow set out earlier this week to tag sharks off Donegal, as part of a project funded by the Heritage Council.

“In two hours last Monday we tagged 23 sharks, and we found 19 the following day – four of which had been tagged the day before,” Dr Berrow said. By the third day, they had tagged their 50^th basking shark.

Basking sharks were once a significant source of income for Irish whalers and the coastal towns of Galway and Waterford did for instance have street lights lit with basking shark oil as early as the 18^th century.

The importance of Basking sharks in Irish culture is evident in the number of names and monikers give to these peculiar creatures. In Irish, this “monster with sails” is known under the names Liabhán chor gréine (Great fish of the sun), Liop an dá (unwieldy beast with two finns) and Liabhán mór (great leviathan) – just to mention a few. The epithets “Fish of the sun” and “Sunfish” both pertains to its fondness of swimming just under the surface.

In the mid-1970s the Irish stopped their whaling, but the problems weren’t over for these sharks since they frequently ended up as by-catch in drift nets; a fishing method now outlawed in Irish waters. In addition to this, Norwegian whalers continued to hunt for shark off the Irish coast until 1986.

The Basking shark (Cetorhinus maximus) is listed as Vulnerable on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, and is a protected species in Great Britain but not in Ireland. However, the European Union has just placed a moratorium on fishing for Basking sharks in these waters.

If you spot a Basking shark in Irish waters, the Irish Whale and Dolphin Group would very much like to know any details about the sighting. You can find more information at www.baskingshark.ie.

Want to know more about Basking sharks and where they head when the Northern Seas become too cold for comfort? Check out our earlier blog post on Sharks of the Caribbean.

The Snubfin dolphin (Orcaella heinsohni), recognized as a species as recently as 2005, have been spotted while utilizing a rare hunting technique previously only noted in the Irrawaddy dolphin (Orcaella brevirostris), a close relative of the Snubfin.

The unusual group hunting technique involves chasing the prey fish to the surface of the ocean and rounding them up by spitting jets of water at them. Once the fish is packed together in a reasonably small “cylinder”, the dolphins move in to devour them.

According to WWF Australia’s marine and coasts manager Lydia Gibson, the behaviour was first noticed in Australia off the Kimberley Coast.

We still know very little about the Snubfin dolphin, which lives along Australia’s northern coast in a number of locations off the Queensland and Northern Territory coasts, as well as the Kimberley region of Western Australia. It is listed as Near Threatened on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, chiefly due to habitat destruction. Since Snubfin dolphins live close to shore, they are also more likely to end up in gill nets and drown compared to more pelagic species of dolphin.

The juvenile Hawksbill turtle found near-dead 8 months ago with a plastic shopping bag lodged inside her belly has made a remarkable recovery and has now been released back into the ocean. The Hawksbill turtle is listed as Critically Endangered on the IUCN Red List of ThreatenSped ecies, so each specimen that can be rescued is important for the population.

Eight months ago the young female, who has been dubbed Alva by her caregivers, was found halfway up the beach, upside down, with her head buried in the sand, slowly dying in the sun. She was rushed to Townsville’s Reef HQ turtle hospital where x-rays revealed that a large piece of plastic stuck inside her had caused a severe gut blockage.

In addition to receiving treatment for the blockage, Alva was bathed, scrubbed and hand-fed by the turtle hospital staff who gradually nursed her back to life from the near-death experience.

“We brought it back from brink of death”, said Reef HQ aquarium acting director Fred Nucifora. “That is the miracle.”

On May 21, Alva was deemed healthy enough to return to the sea and was released into the water in the Australian Great Barrier Reef Region.

“It was emotional to say goodbye,” said Nucifora. “We’d like to think Alva turned back and gave us a heartfelt look, but it was barely a glance and, with a flick of the flipper, she was off.”

A Hawaiian company wants to build the world’s first commercial Bigeye tuna farm, in hope of creating a sustainable alternative to wild-caught big eye.

Bigeye tuna, Thunnus obesus, is the second most coveted tuna after the famous Bluefin tuna and the wild populations have been seriously depleted by commercial fishing fleets. As Bluefin is becoming increasingly rare due to over-fishing, consumers are turning their eyes towards Thunnus obesus – which naturally puts even more stress on this species that before.

In 2007, fishermen caught nearly 225,000 tons of wild Bigeye in the Pacific. Juvenile bigeye tuna like to stay close to floating objects in the ocean, such as logs and buoys, which make them highly susceptible to purse seine fishing in conjunction with man-made FADs (Fish Aggregation Devices). The removal of juvenile specimens from the sea before they have a chance to reach sexual maturity and reproduce is seriously threatening the survival of this tuna species.

“All indications are we’re on a rapid race to deplete the ocean of our food resources,” said Bill Spencer, chief executive of Hawaii Oceanic Technology Inc. “It’s sort of obvious _ well, jeez we’ve got to do something about this.”

Techniques to spawn and raise tuna fry are still being tentatively explored by scientists in several different countries, including Australia and Japan. As of today, most tuna farms rely on fishermen catching juvenile fish for them, but Hawaii Oceanic Technology plans to artificially hatch Bigeye tuna at a University of Hawaii lab in Hilo.

Once the young tunas from the lab have grown large enough, they will be placed in the 12-pen tuna farm that Hawaii Oceanic is planning to build roughly 3 miles off Big Island’s west coast. Each pen will have a diameter of 50 metres (168 feet) and the entire farm will be spread out over one square kilometre (250 acres). If everything goes according to plan, this project will yield 6,000 tons of Bigeye per annum. The fish will not be harvested until it reaches a weight of at least 45 kg (100 lbs).

In an effort to avoid many of the common problems associated with large scale commerical fish farmning, Hawaii Oceanic Technology will place their pens at a depth of 1,300 feet (400 metres) where currents are strong. The company also plans to keep their pens lightly stocked, since dense living conditions are known to increase the risk of disease in fish farms.

Farming pens can cause problems for the environment if fish waste and left-over food is allowed to collect under the pens, suffocating marine life living beneath. Other problems associated with fish farming are the release of antibiotics into the water and the escape of invasive species.

Fish farms can also put pressure on fish further down in the food chain since vast amounts of food is necessary to feed densely packed fish pens, and Peter Bridson, aquaculture manager at the Monterey Bay Aquarium in California, is concerned about how much fish meal the Hawaiian farm will use need to feed its tuna.

“You kind of have to come back to the whole debate on whether these fish are the right thing for us humans to be eating,” said Bridson. “There are lots of other things which have a lower impact in terms of how they are farmed.”

Spencer shares this concern and says Hawaii Oceanic wish to eventually develop other ways of feeding their fish, e.g. by creating food from soybeans or algae. It might also be possible to decrease the need for fish meal by recycling fish oil from the farm itself.

“We’re concerned about the environmental impact of what we’re doing,” Spencer said. “Our whole goal is to do this in an environmentally responsible manner.”

An important step in the ground-breaking Clean Seas Tuna breeding program was taken today when millions of dollars worth of Southern Bluefin Tuna was airlifted from sea pens off South Australia’s Eyre Peninsula to an on-shore breeding facility at Arno Bay.

The Southern Bluefin Tuna is a highly appreciated food fish and the remaining wild populations are continuously being ravished by commercial fishing fleets, despite the species status as “critically endangered” on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species.

The Australian tuna breeding program is the first of its kind and will hopefully help ease the strain on wild populations. The air transfer was made to provide the breeding program with an egg supply ahead of the spawning period.

As reported earlier, the Australian company Clean Seas Tuna managed to successfully produce Southern Bluefin Tuna fingerlings in March this year and they are now hoping to commence commercial production of the species no later than October.

WWF Australia’s fisheries program manager Peter Trott says any advancement that would reduce pressure on wild tuna stocks is welcome, but he also cautions against the environmental problems associated with large-scale aquacultures. It is for instance common to use other fish to feed farmed fish, which can put pressure on wild fish populations.

U.S. and Canadian scientists have documented the first known migration of blue whales from the coast of California to areas off British Columbia and the Gulf of Alaska since the 1965 ban of commercial whaling.

Researchers identified 15 separate cases where Blue Whales were spotted in the waters off British Columbia and the Gulf of Alaska. Four of the observed animals were identified as Blue Whales previously seen swimming in Californian waters, which suggests that Blue Whales are re-establishing their old migration pattern.

The identifications were made by comparing pictures of Blue Whales photographed in the northern parts of the Pacific Ocean since 1997 with photographs of Blue Whales taken off the southern U.S. West Coast. The identity of individual Blue Whales was determined based on dorsal fin shape and pigmentation patterns in skin colour.

The Blue Whale was almost hunted to extinction during the 20^th century and even though commercial whaling has been prohibited (albeit not strictly enforced) since 1965 the populations are having a hard time recovering. Blue Whales are still listed as endangered on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species and no more than roughly 5,000 to 12,000 Blue Whales are believed to remain in our oceans, with 2,000 of them living of the U.S. West Coast.

The migration research was conducted by scientists from Cascadia Research Collective in Washington State, NOAA’s* Southwest Fisheries Science Center in California, and Canada’s Department of Fisheries and Oceans. You can read the full article in the most recent issue of the journal Marine Mammal Science.

* The United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)

I thought I would report on a few good news in the world of marine conservation. First of we are going to look at tuna fishing and the endangered Mediterranean Blue fin Tuna. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) an organization consisting of NGOs and governments surprisingly voted to cut tuna quotas in half (almost) in the Mediterranean as well as instituting a complete fishing ban during the spawning season in May and June when they meet at the World Conservation Congress in Barcelona. The surprising result came after Spain (an important fishing nation) and Japan (the key blue fin market) supported the restricted fishing to prevent the tuna population from collapsing. The IUCN Decision is not legally binding but puts a considerable amount of pressure on the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT) which will decide the future of tuna fishing for the coming years at a meeting in December. The effects of diminished quotas remain to be seen as a rapport from the WWF earlier this month showed that half all tuna caught in Italy was caught illegally and that illegal fishing was rampant in Italy.

I am going to leave tuna and talk about something completely different, Beluga whales. The US government this week listed the Beluga whales of Alaska’s Cook Inlet as an endangered species / population. The decision means much stricter rules about what can and can’t be done in the area and local authorities need to get the permission of the National Marine Fisheries Service before they can approve a number of activities in the area. Governor and GOP vice president candidate Sara Palin is worried that the decision will prevent economic growth in the area. She fears that the decision among other things will prevent the expansion of the harbor. The population declined nearly 50 percent between 1994 and 1998 and has not yet recovered. This is believed to be due to developments in the area, predation from killer whales and frequent whale strandings. Environmentalists hope that the new found protection will help increase the population again.

Beluga whale

A conservation group named Bush Heritage Australia will spend $3.5 millions on the purchase and ongoing management of 8100 hectares in Central Queensland. The main reason for the purchase is to safeguard the rare Redfin blue-eye fish.

The property, Edgbaston Station, is connected to a network of more than 50 artesian springs that provides Edgbaston pools with spring water from the Great Artesian Basin. The spring-fed pools are surrounded by arid landscape and the isolation has given numerous endemic species a chance to develop, including several species of fish, snails, plants and a crustacean. The entire known population of Redfin blue-eye resides in five spring-fed pools at Edgbaston. In addition to arid grass lands and spring-fed pools, the property also contains woodlands and wetlands and is an important region for migratory birds. The rare Redfin blue-eye fish is therefore not the only species that will benefit from the purchase.

A substantial part of the money used to finance the acquisition of Edgbaston Station – $1.324 millions – comes from the Australian Government’s “Maintaining Australia’s Biodiversity Hotspots” program­. The two departments “Qld Department of Natural Resources and Water” and “Qld Department for Sustainability, Climate Change and Innovation” have also assisted, together with Bush Heritage Australia volunteers and donors.

Edgbaston Station is located within the traditional country of the Iningai people and Bush Heritage Australia plans to work together with them to understand and protect the cultural values of the property.

“Edgbaston has exceptional biodiversity value and Bush Heritage is proud to own, manage and protect such an important Australian landscape,” says Doug Humann, CEO of Bush Heritage Australia. “This purchase will allow us to closely manage the health of Edgbaston’s incredible artesian springs, which support a variety of life forms unique to the region.”

Bush Heritage Australia currently owns and manages 31 reserves throughout Australia. You can find more information on their site: http://www.bushheritage.org.au.

1 Australian dollar = 0.8 U.S. dollars

Facts about the Red-finned Blue-eye

The Red-finned Blue-eye (Scaturiginichthys vermeilipinnis) lives in spring fed pools in Queensland and the species has only been encountered in a handful of pools. None of the pools are very large and the average water depth is just a few centimetres. The pools are located in a very arid part of Australia and there is hardly any surrounding vegetation that can shadow the shallow water. During the hot season, the air temperature can reach 50 degrees C (122 degrees F) during the day and the water in the pools can become almost as warm as the surrounding air. The Red-finned Blue-eye is however not only capable of handling a high water temperatures; it is also very tolerant to rapid changes in water temperature since the shallow pools where it lives change temperature rapidly as the surrounding air temperature fluctuates. During the cold season, the water temperature can be as cold as 3 degrees C (37 degrees F).

The Red-finned Blue-eye is listed as “Critically Endangered” on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species.