- In a repudiation of one of Japan's major justifications
for whaling, The HSUS released a scientific report on Monday, July 19,
that shows that, overall, marine mammals and fisheries do not compete with
each other for food in the world's oceans. Japan and its allies have argued
for years that whales are causing fish stocks to crash and therefore should
be killed to help the fishing industry and perhaps even alleviate world
hunger.
-
- On the opening day of the 56th annual International Whaling
Commission meeting in Sorrento, Italy, The HSUS held a press conference
to unveil "Competition Between Marine Mammals and Fisheries: Food
for Thought," a groundbreaking new scientific report by Dr. Daniel
Pauly and Ph.D. candidate Kristin Kaschner.
-
-
- "Our analysis clearly shows that there is no evidence
that food competition between [marine mammals and fisheries] is a global
problem," Pauly and Kaschner write in the executive summary of their
report. "Consequently, there is little basis to blame marine mammals
for the crisis world fisheries are facing today. There is even less support
for the suggestion that we could solve any of these urgent global problems,
caused by a long history of mismanagement of fisheries, by reducing marine
mammal populations."
-
- Pauly and Kaschner's report is the first of its kind.
Others have mapped isolated areas, like the waters around Iceland, Pauly
said, but no previous study has ever mapped all the world's oceans for
overlaps between fisheries and marine mammals.
-
- The HSUS helped fund this study, which was supervised
by Pauly, recognized around the world as a scientific expert on global
fisheries and marine ecosystems. He is a professor at the Fisheries Centre,
University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver. Pauly is also the principal
investigator of the Sea Around Us Project, based at the Fisheries Centre.
Kaschner, a student of Pauly's, joined the Marine Mammal Research Unit
at the Fisheries Centre in late 1998 to work on her Ph.D., and has been
a member of the Sea Around Us Project team since 1999.
-
- Crunching Numbers
-
- Here's how the scientists came to their conclusions:
Kaschner painstaking put together a computer model of the world's oceans,
using a wide variety of data to map the overlaps between marine mammals
and fisheries. She divided the oceans into 180,000 individual cells, and
spelled out each cell's characteristics: its water depth, its temperature,
whether ice forms on it, etc.
-
- >From there, Kaschner pooled data on what's known
about every species of marine mammal: the water temperature each species
likes, the preferred water depth, what kind of food each eats, etc. She
then could determine the probability of finding each species in every one
of the 180,000 cells. She could also determine, based on marine mammal
consumption patterns, how much of eight different kinds of food each species
eats in a particular cell.
-
- Kaschner then compared that information with fisheries'
catch data in each cellóin other words, how much fisheries caught
of each of the eight food sources. When the computer finally crunched all
of this data, the scientists discovered something that didn't really surprise
them: There's very little overlap between marine mammals and fisheries.
-
- "We find that the bulk of consumption by marine
mammals occurs in areas of low overlap [with fisheries]," Pauly told
The HSUS during an interview. "In other words, what marine mammals
consume is largely stuff that we do not catch in areas where we do not
fish."
-
- That last point is important. Japan and its allies routinely
claim that marine mammals eat millions more tons of food annually from
the world's oceans than humans do. Which is technically true. What these
countries neglect to mention, however, is what type of food. This report
shows that most of the food consumed by whales consists of prey species
that fisheries do not target.
-
- "Actually, [marine mammals] eat many times more
food, but not many times more fish," Pauly clarified. "The bulk
of what they eat is actually not fish, it's krill and other things that
we don't eat."
-
- To The HSUS's marine mammal scientist, Naomi Rose, common
sense and a little historical perspective would tell you that whales, all
by themselves, don't cause fish stocks to collapse.
-
- "Marine mammals co-existed with fish and other species
for millions of years before factory fishing came along and wreaked all
of this havoc," says Rose. "Fisheries collapses are recent developments,
evolutionarily speakingósay, in the last few hundred years and the
big collapses only in the last few decades. How is it that whales didn't
cause fish stock collapses back when there were millions more of them,
before we killed them all? The idea that natural predators cause their
prey species to collapse catastrophically is false for the most part. If
that's how ecosystems naturally worked, no predators would be left. Humans
are the only predator who has this bad habit of causing wide-scale prey
collapses."
-
- "It is the present fisheries management approaches
and the export of fisheries products from developing countriesónot
whalesóthat endanger food security," adds Kitty Block, special
counsel for The HSUS's United Nations and Treaties section.
-
- Research from the Food Agriculture Organization (FAO)
of the United Nations confirms this. According to the FAO, the number of
commercial fishers and fish farmers has more than doubled in the last 25
years. As a result, fish stocks are being seriously depleted due to overfishing
by humans.
-
- The FAO estimates that 60-70% of global fish stocks require
urgent intervention to control or reduce fishing to avoid further declines
and to rebuild depleted stocks. Compounding the problem is the fact that
commercial fisheries annually discard about 20 million tons of fish as
bycatch. The FAO estimated that a drastic reduction of at least 30% of
world fishing capacity is required in order to rebuild overfished resources.
-
- A Public Concern
-
- Even though The HSUS released this report at the opening
of the annual IWC meeting, its content is really oriented toward the public,
not IWC delegates, Pauly said. The public, after all, can pressure pro-whaling
nations once it learns the truth.
-
- "It's for the public to know that it is not true
that you could feed the world with the food that marine mammals consume,"
the scientist said. "Historically, it's the public's perception that
ultimately matters in such things. The killing of dolphins by the tuna
industry has been a good example of that. It's not the industry that changed;
itís the public that forced them to change."
-
- "Our hope," notes The HSUS's Block, "is
that the Food for Thought report will mean an end, once and for all, to
Japan's ridiculous justification for killing whales. We also hope that
it encourages scientists and politicians to address the true cause of the
problemóoverfishing by humans."
-
- To read "Competition Between Marine Mammals and
Fisheries: Food for Thought," download the PDF document. http://65.61.158.165/web-files/PDF/FoodForThought_v2.pdf
-
- Copyright © 2004 The Humane Society of the United
States. All rights reserved. http://www.hsus.org/ace/21314
|
