Our Dying Seas

The marauder first appeared as a bright blip on a radar screen aboard a Canadian Forces Aurora surveillance aircraft. The plane had been in the air for three hours, patrolling the Pacific Ocean near the international date line northwest of Hawaii. As dawn broke on the June morning, the four-engine plane dropped down for a closer look. Recalls navigator Eric Johnstrudc: “We came in at about 200 feet on this guy and noticed a whole lot of floats in the water. The floats led us straight to a white vessel, about 150 feet long, which fit the description of a drift-net boat.”

Canadian authorities relayed that suspicion to the US Coast Guard, which dispatched a cutter to intercept the vessel. After a two-week chase, the cutter’s crew finally boarded the Cao Yu 6025, a stateless ship, south of Japan. In the hold, they found damning evidence: 110 tons of tuna and shark fins, and a drift gillnet almost 20 kilometres long — an indiscriminate killer of marine life banned on high seas under an international agreement.

Out of sight, and mostly out of mind, the oceans are under siege. Scientists from around the world are reporting global disturbances in the seas that threaten to bring Richard Cashin’s grim warning home to every Canadian household. From the polar seas to the tropics, fish populations have collapsed or teeter on the brink. In a third of the Pacific, plankton that form the foundation of the marine food chain are vanishing. In every comer of the planet, increasing temperatures are obliterating some species, while driving others into unfamiliar waters. As science scrambles to make sense of uneven data, evidence points to an alarming conclusion: the sea, the cradle of life, is dying.

The killers are numerous. The most obvious, global overfishing, harvests 70 per cent of the world’s species faster than they can reproduce themselves. But the scientific community is not even sure that is the worst menace to the seas. Other major threats: human pollution, including an estimated 700 million gallons of toxic chemicals dumped into the sea each year, and global warming, widely attributed to industrial production of so-called greenhouse gases, which appears to be affecting ocean temperatures.

Sharply pricier seafood is wily the mildest consequence; others are far more serious. In many parts of the world, fishing jobs have disappeared. On Canada’s East Coast, 26,000 unemployed former fish workers drew income from the federal government’s Atlantic Ground fish Strategy — 15,000 from Newfoundland alone — until its $1.9 billion in funding ran out in August. Far worse, developing countries dependent on marine protein confront the risk of mass starvation. In many regions, rival national claims to the seas’ diminishing harvest hold potential for armed conflict. More terrifying still is the specter of ecological Armageddon, as the oceans lose the capacity to generate the oxygen on which life itself depends.

For too many species, extinction has already come. Half a century ago, 600,000 barn door skate swam North America’s Atlantic seaboard. Never intentionally fished, they, nonetheless, frequently became ensnared in nets or on hooks. By the 1070s, scientists could find no more than 500 skate throughout its previous range. Now, they can’t find any. “If bald eagles were as common as robins and then disappeared, someone would notice,’’ says biologist Ransom Myers of Hallifax’s Dalhousie University. “In the ocean, no one knows. No one cares.”

Belatedly, a handful of governments and others have begun to notice, to care and to act, moving tentatively to rein in the worst abuses of the seas. 'His patrol that spotted the Cao Yu was one of six that Canada donates each year to enforce an international ban on drift nets, blamed for killing dolphins, sharks, turtles, and seabirds, in addition to their intended catch. On September 1, the federal government designated two protected marine habitats at Race Rocks and Gabriola Passage, British Columbia — the first in a preserves in Canadian waters where fishing will be banned. On the same day, an international commission concluded three years of study by urging coastal nations to bury their differences and form a world authority to regulate fishing beyond the 200-mile (370-kilomctre) economic zones of individual states.

Individuals and small groups are also taking action where they can. In Toronto, some chefs have agreed to remove swordfish from their menus out of concern for their rapidly declining numbers. In British Columbia, schoolchildren are "adopting’’ streams where salmon spawn, labouring to remove debris and restore the critical habitats. But such bright spots are few. “The sea is in real trouble,” says Elliot Norse, founder of the Redmond, Washington-based Marine Conservation Biology Institute, "much more than we previously thought. There is major disruption even in the deep ocean." In January, 1,600 marine scientists from 65 countries joined Norse in signing a joint appeal to governments “to take decisive action to stop further irreversible damage to the sea’s biological diversity and integrity."

 Critical to the survival of marine life is plankton, the tiny plants and animals that normally teem near the ocean’s surface, providing food for predators from salmon to seabirds. Off the US west coast, scientists have detected a 70 per cent drop in zooplankton (the animal variety) since 1950. The same decades have witnessed an even more staggering decline in the number of migratory sooty shearwaters, seabirds that dine on the tiny creatures. “It used to be the most abundant bird in the California current, by far,” says biologist John McGowan of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at San Diego. Now, 90 per cent arc gone.

Just how far, wide and deep the damage goes is a matter of speculation. The ocean is a big place, full of myriad creature, whose complex relationships mankind has barely begun to identify, let alone understand. To study it, scientists must look beneath its surface, which is expensive. In developing countries, which take three quarters of the world’s fish, science of any kind is a luxury. In Canada, which exports $3 billion worth of seafood a year, research until recently focused almost exclusively on ways to find, count and catch more fish. “In doing that,” acknowledges Richard Beamish, a leading researcher at the federal government’s Pacific Biological Station at Nanaimo, British Columbia, “we sacrificed the opportunity to understand the mechanisms in the ecosystem better."

The limits of scientific knowledge leave some of the most critical questions without any answer. One of those is whether forces big enough to wipe out seven tenths of the zooplankton in the northeast Pacific are also affecting the ocean’s capacity to generate one half of the oxygen released into the biosphere each year. The crucial gas is freed from carbon dioxide as a by-product of the same process by which plants capture carbon for growth: photosynthesis. “We think that photosynthesis and the carbon system have been affected in the east one third of the Pacific,” says Scripps’ McGowan. “But we can’t say, because we don’t have the measurements.”

Knowledgeable assessments of the sea’s future often seem to have an apocalyptic air. Elisabeth Mann-Borgese, Hallifax-based chairwoman of the International Ocean Institute, lays most of the blame for the seals’ sickness on humans — who will ultimately pay the cost. “What we are doing is killing ourselves,” she says soberly. “It is the human race that will die out if we don’t do something.” Federal Fisheries and Oceans Minister David Anderson, under fire in the fishing community for the restrictions he has imposed on catches, also struck a dire note when interviewed by Maclean’s. “We have a major crisis in the oceans,” Anderson said. “If we don’t start undertaking effective measures, internationally, we are dead.’’