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Estimates of Marine Mammals Killed by Fishing Nets

Posted by michael on from the thanks-for-all-the-fishing-nets dept.

thomasmd writes "Yahoo has an article describing the results of a new study by American and Scottish researchers that looked at the number of deaths by drowning of cetaceans (fishlike sea mammals) caught in fishing nets. Their alarming estimate was that more than 1000 cetaceans die every day from net entanglement."

39 comments

  1. Do we need them? by eggstasy · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I'm not a biologist, but I've always believed that humans are very hypocritical with environmental issues. Sure, diversity is good and all, but are we saving the whales because they're cute or because they're actually a useful part of the ecosystem?
    It seems that everyone wories about cute little pandas and dolphins while exterminating valuable insects en masse just because they're ugly.

    1. Re:Do we need them? by MobyDisk · · Score: 3, Insightful

      You are right that humans favor things that meet their requirements for beauty. You insect example is right on. We need to use logic in these matters, not emotion.

      But you imply something quite scary: Do humans have the right to determine which species ar contributing to the ecosystem, and exterminate the rest? Are we capable of doing this? qualified? What if we make a mistake?

      I believe that it is a better solution to identify the areas we are having the most impact, minimize it, and let nature run its course. Let's not second guess nature. It's done a good job of maintaining things long before we were around... :-)

    2. Re:Do we need them? by Echnin · · Score: 1
      I think the human race, when proclaiming ourselves as masters of the world, pretty much made ourselves morally obligated not to mess up the world too badly. Whales and pandas are endangered species, and exterminating them doesn't seem like a very ethical thing to do. How important parts of the eco-system they are is not the deciding factor of whether we should kill them or not.

      Has anyone ever tasted whale meat, by the way? I have, and it tastes like shit. Still, whales provide a lot of food per sentient being, so they're not a horrible waste in that manner.

      As for insects, I try not to kill them. I'm strange that way.

      --
      Lalala
    3. Re:Do we need them? by tha_mink · · Score: 2, Insightful

      "But you imply something quite scary: Do humans have the right to determine which species ar contributing to the ecosystem, and exterminate the rest?"

      Yes, I think we do. In the same manor that a beaver does when it dams up a river with no regard for what happens to the rest of the system. It is, after all, survival of the fittest. We are not casting net in order to kill off any species, we are just trying to survive another day. (and eat sushi while we do)

      Furthur more, if we are nieve enough to think that we can understand all the factors that go into species proliferation, then, we deserve what we get.

      --
      You'll have that sometimes...
    4. Re:Do we need them? by Christopher+Thomas · · Score: 3, Insightful

      But you imply something quite scary: Do humans have the right to determine which species ar contributing to the ecosystem, and exterminate the rest? Are we capable of doing this? qualified? What if we make a mistake?

      Why would we not have the right to mold the world as we see fit? If we don't, who does, and on what authority are we forbidden from making changes?

      I agree that large-scale mucking about may be dangerous for us - we're near the top of the ecosystem, and so in a relatively fragile position - but abstaining from making changes on that basis is a question of prudence, not of "rights".

      I believe that it is a better solution to identify the areas we are having the most impact, minimize it, and let nature run its course. Let's not second guess nature. It's done a good job of maintaining things long before we were around... :-)

      Nature has no grand plan, though. It's literally a random process, and most definitely doesn't have our welfare in its best interest - it _has_ no interests. If anything, we should expect life to become more difficult for us if we leave it to nature's ebb and flow (we multiplied because there was a favourable environment, but environments change).

      In summary, I do not see why nature running unhindered would work towards any human-oriented goal.

      On the other hand, this entire debate is rather silly without a set of goals everyone agrees on :). I'm just trying to throw thought-provoking questions at you.

    5. Re:Do we need them? by tha_mink · · Score: 1

      Actually naif is a perfectly cromulent word. It's a variant of naive.

      --
      You'll have that sometimes...
    6. Re:Do we need them? by Echnin · · Score: 1

      Actually, "naive" should be "naÃve".

      --
      Lalala
    7. Re:Do we need them? by ctr2sprt · · Score: 2, Insightful
      There is no morality to nature. There is no thinking to nature. Nature doesn't maintain things. Evolution is just so slow, compared to the human lifespan, that we don't usually see it happening.

      It bugs me to see people blaming humans for this imbalance in nature. Do you think humans sprang fully-formed from the earth? Of course not. We're the product of millions of years of evolution. If you insist on anthropomorphizing nature, well, Nature shot herself in the foot when she made us, and she's got nobody to blame but herself. We're only doing what evolution commands us to (screw like rabbits and kill anything that looks at us cockeyed). Nature has absolutely no understanding of foresight or planning: that's what we do. We are improving on nature by recognizing the dangers in eliminating other species.

    8. Re:Do we need them? by netkgb · · Score: 1

      I would prefer to live in a world where some people still care about the environment instead of one where everyone has given up on the idea of protecting at least some of the creatures.

    9. Re:Do we need them? by JWSmythe · · Score: 1

      I agree completely. It seems someone will always get a wild hair up their ass about some particular animal/species, and go completely nuts about it.

      "Save the whales" with particularly gruesome pictures was always lovely. I've lived a small farm, and seen various animals slaughtered, so it just didn't have the same effect on me as it does to high school "I have to change the world today" kids..

      High school kids are great. They're inspired to make a change, and can be manipulated to work for or against almost any cause. There are always lots of then, and next year there will be even more.

      I'm worried about lizards, squirrels, and small song birds.. Those are what my cats have brought home, usually dead. How many small creatures are killed by the dreaded Felis Domesticus! Forget what the humans are doing to 1,000 sea creatures per day (or the millions of tons of intended catch that they kill), imagine how many birds are killed every year!

      How do those rank up with bird road-kills? How about human road-kills (err, pedestrian accidents)?

      --
      Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
  2. How Many Die by MBCook · · Score: 4, Insightful
    How many die each day of:
    • Natural causes
    • Getting hit by boats
    • Being eaten by preditors
    • etc

    Without that kind of information, it's hard to tell just how serious this is. Sure 1000 sounds like alot, but what if 5000 are hit by boats ever day? Then that would be more important. I seriously doubt that that happens anywhere near that frequency, but you get the idea. Numbers don't mean much without perspective.

    --
    Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
  3. Interesting Headlines by GigsVT · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I guess if the story was titled "Save the Whales", no one would take it seriously anymore.

    At least they admit they pulled the statistics out of their ass:

    To reach the worldwide estimates, the researchers resorted to multiplying the U.S. statistics.

    --
    I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
    1. Re:Interesting Headlines by Idarubicin · · Score: 1
      At least they admit they pulled the statistics out of their ass:
      To reach the worldwide estimates, the researchers resorted to multiplying the U.S. statistics.

      On the other hand, this probably does produce a reasonably conservative estimate. Precisely because there is a fondness in the United States for cute sea creatures, U.S. fishers are probably more careful about the harm they do to marine mammals. (Not because they're necessarily nicer people, but because their corporate masters fear crucifixion in the media.) Similarly, Canadian and European trawlers are probably also more considerate of 'cute' sea life.

      --
      ~Idarubicin
    2. Re:Interesting Headlines by mrmeval · · Score: 1

      This is the one reason I don't trust any 'green' report, they pull it all out of dark wet places.

      --
      I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
  4. More information by MobyDisk · · Score: 3, Informative

    This article says similar things with more detailed information.
    Our Dying Seas?"

    Lots of these surveys draw conclusions about extinction and talk about percentages, but I have never seen an actual estimate of the cetacean population on the Earth. Do we have ANY FRIGGIN CLUE how many there are?

    1. Re:More information by zenyu · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Do we have ANY FRIGGIN CLUE how many there are?

      I think we have some good numbers on whales, in some species they all have names. But dolphins we don't really know, we know we're seeing much fewer than we used to but they may just be avoiding us. With some species we actually know there are much fewer, like "pink dolphins" or river dolphins, there you can actually just go out and count how many cross your path in a clear part of the river. I had a marine biologist roommate one summer and she would talk about so and so whale being missing this year.

      The populations are probably falling more do to the lack of food than our actually catching the ocean mammals. We're pretty much killing our oceans with overfishing. Some countries, like Iceland have done well with resellable quotas (so you don't end up with a quota that lets you fish one day of the year with your super efficient new boat.) But that doesn't help migrating species that just get devistated somewhere else. We really need international agreement on fishing quotas, but that's not going to happen until more coutries try to manage their own fisheries. The New England cod economy completely collapsed yet the US hasn't even tried to save the still economic west coast fisheries. Totally irresponsible. Then there are the Japanese and Russians that go out and completely destroy whole swaths of ocean in international waters, destroying the market value of their catch with the rought treatment as well. They scrape up the ocean bottom so it takes decades for fish to return to the area in fishable numbers.

      Sometimes one factory can devastate a whole country's ocean front. Peru has a single fish meal factory near Pisco that in the last decade has consumed so many anchovies that not only are they having problems getting anchovies, but all the regular fish are gone since there aren't enough anchovies for them to eat. They've now put some quotas on anchovy fishing, but it's not at a level that will let the population grow back. That would lose current jobs and most of the fishing jobs are already long gone... Here the problem is that if you target the bottom of the food chain for overexploitation you're just screewed.

      We're really seeing this tragedy of the commons in the oceans because most countries haven't had the political incentive to put real quotas on there own fishermen when the fishermen rightly say the neighbors will just catch them instead, and no one seems to have any interest in a global solution. That is seen as an environmental thing and most governments have a knee jerk reaction against that. Economically it's just stupid to treat fish as a non-renewable resource to be consumed before your competitors do, they restore their populations pretty darn quickly if you just let them.

  5. Definition of fascism by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    "Fascism:Extreme right-wing dictatorial government,belligerently nationalist,that merges state and business leadership "

    Your definition so conventiently leaves out the left-wing dictators, who have been some of the worst fascists of all.

    1. Re:Definition of fascism by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I didnt come up with that definition, and I have no political affiliation or agenda, but it seems only logical that if a self-proclaimed left-wing government begins to fit the description mentioned above, which was adapted from a dictionary, it wouldn't be a left-wing government anymore.

    2. Re:Definition of fascism by isorox · · Score: 1

      Like Marxists, or the NAtional ZocIalists

  6. Left-wing governments by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    "it wouldn't be a left-wing government anymore."

    All of the strongest/worst left-wing governments have fit that definition, and they are/were still left-wing.

    1. Re:Left-wing governments by isorox · · Score: 1

      depends on your definition of left/right wing.

      If you look at just economics, with state-markets on the far left and free-markets on the far right, then the worst regimes of recent times have been on the far left (Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot) or at the very least left of center (Hitler).

      But many people equate rightwing with authoritarian, so they say that Hitler, and the BNP, are right wing

      Either way, right/left isn't a very good way of defining ones political beliefs.

  7. I thought it said crustaceans... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Funny

    Their alarming estimate was that more than 1000 cetaceans die every day from net entanglement.

    I thought it said crustaceans...

    In other news, 12,240,200 fish die everyday from net entanglement.

    In soviet russia, the cetaceans entangle you!

    Imagine a beowulf cluster of those!

  8. Who Cares? by grimani · · Score: 1, Insightful

    ...In other news, 86,400 humans died today from hunger, a rate of one per second.

    Who gives a shit about ceta-whats? There are more than enough human problems to dedicate time and energy to, why do people concern themselves with this?

    1. Re:Who Cares? by TripleA · · Score: 1

      Duh! If we kill all the sea animals, the eco-system will probably go BSOD, and the next thing you know is the air consisting of 100% CO2, and you not being able to breathe.

    2. Re:Who Cares? by mrmeval · · Score: 1


      Eventually we'll be able to just scoop up the whole mass and make CHON food. Or better yet make it from intersteller matter.

      Re: Charles Sheffield "The Compleat McAndrew"

      --
      I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
    3. Re:Who Cares? by gobbo · · Score: 1
      why do people concern themselves with this?

      Plenty of reasons. First, ecology is way over our heads, and we don't realize what we're doing when we pull a thread out of the tapestry... maybe the whole thing will fall apart, maybe it will just be less interesting. But the precautionary principle should apply, since we don't understand the risks.

      Second, cetaceans are also way over our heads. They may have language; dolphins can carry on something like a two-way simultaneous conversation, where two of them in a tank separated by a wall can chat over a speaker and cooperate on a task to achieve a goal -- while simultaneously 'talking' and listening. Dolphin brains are very large, evolutionarily. In other words, they may be intelligent in a way we can identify, and may have compensated for the lack of hands with other means. We Just Don't Know. If they are, are they less important than any human?

      Starving humans is not an ecological/industrial fishing issue, since there is more than enough food and money and expertise to feed everyone without denuding the oceans or desertifying the forests (duh) -- it is a political issue. We spend trillions on warfare, when a small portion of that would provide water/food/education/shelter. This profit-and-geopolitically generated poverty is the big eco-crisis--starvation is only a symptom, as is overfishing.

      There are other moral/ethical/scientific arguments galore. But human manifest destiny is an empty promise without a sense of ecological responsibility, and history will damn us for it.

      --
      Damn those pesky terrorists
  9. Oh you will be modded down for such truth... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Because they haven't visited the third world.

    No one gives a shit about the darkies.

  10. Last chance for European cod by dharmawan · · Score: 1

    on a similar note...
    http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns999 93829

    it's time to get much more serious about restrictions on fishing.

  11. utterly useless comment. by m00by · · Score: 1

    shave the whales! =D

  12. Sustainable fishing by Beaufort100 · · Score: 1

    It doesn't matter how many cetaceans are being killed by fishermen, it's whether the current population can absorb the losses. Say you have a 100 animals, of which in a year, 10% will die from natural causes, this means the population has to reproduce 10 more animals to be sustainable. Say another 10% of animals were then killed each year, the population would then need to reproduce a further 10 animals (total of 20) to be sustainable. When there are more animals being removed from the population than the population can replace is when the trouble starts. Of course, knowing what the sustainable rate is for each species is one of population biology's big goals - until that happens there will always be lots of assumptions in any of the statistics.

  13. Here's an idea. by phrackwulf · · Score: 1

    Has it occurred to anyone that the Earth is such a vastly complex and effective machine that just about anything we do makes no difference, whatsoever? This planet operates on time scales that are frankly unimagineable. We're going to be here for a while, then poof, the whales aren't going to miss us. I think environmentalism is a uniquely human form of hubris. That certainly doesn't absolve us of the need to act ethically to the most practical extent, but whining about trashing the planet is frankly unimaginative. We don't have that kind of power. [-)

    --
    What would Richard Feynman do, if he were here right now? He'd do some math and he'd follow through!
    1. Re:Here's an idea. by ravenousbugblatter · · Score: 1

      I've wondered that mayself. The problem is that, as implied by your argument, we have no idea how the planet functions as a single ecosystem. Therefore it's possible that anything we do could really screw it up. Better to be safe than sorry. Rather than just take the attitude that it may not be a problem, which essentially gives carte blanche to anyone who wants to just run over the environment in order to give short term benefits to humans, we should try and minimize our impact here in order that we can remain here. Of course, it may all be useless and an asteroid may kill all life on earth any day now ;~)

    2. Re:Here's an idea. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      There is a word for this POV: nihilism.

      It is the type of diseased mindset of the suicidal nutcase.

      No thanks.

    3. Re:Here's an idea. by phrackwulf · · Score: 1

      I disagree, I feel I'm reframing this debate in terms of ethical and moral obligation as opposed to a neo-religious view as expressed by Rousseau. Because humans are capable of seeing the value in the earth and animals, we have an ethical and moral obligation to not waste or destroy either. This should not be twisted in such a way as to harm the interests of humans and proceeding from a humbler viewpoint may ultimately be healthier. The level of damage caused by destroying the animals in question needs to be assessed in a realistic manner. This may or may not be the effect of the present study. [-)

      --
      What would Richard Feynman do, if he were here right now? He'd do some math and he'd follow through!