Human intervention is making the oceans increasingly inhospitable to marine life. We must work individually and collectively to stop this preventable tragedy. If we all do the bare minimum, our combined actions can be massive
The reported death of a whale, which had swallowed 80 plastic bags, in southern Thailand, warrants serious concern. First, it focuses on the plight of whales. Second, its death, despite all efforts at revival, further underlines how dangerous the consequences of swallowing plastic can be. Third, it focuses on oceanic pollution of which the presence of plastic bags is a major part.
As to the first, not just plastic bags, container ships are killing a growing number of whales through accidents. Then there is killing for commercial purposes. Japan’s whaling expedition in the Antarctic waters, that began early this year, planned to kill 333 Minke whales in four months. The International Whaling Commission (IWC) imposed a moratorium on hunting in 1985. Ever since then Japan has been using a loophole that allows killing for scientific research. Even the International court of Justice’s (ICJ) order of 2014, directing it to halt its regular hunt in the Antarctic Waters because the project did not meet conventional research norms, has not deterred it. Though it cancelled its 2014-15 hunt, it renewed it the following year in the garb of a new programme, which is widely regarded as a cover for commercial whaling, banned under the IWC’s moratorium. Japan’s claim that the killings advanced research in whale behaviour and biology, is spurious. As Australia’s federal environment minister Josh Frydenberg has stated, “It is not necessary to kill whales in order to study them.”
Japan is unlikely to heed growing international condemnation. last year, its Parliament passed a series of laws aiming at a return to full-scale commercial whaling in the high seas. One reason for Japan’s defiance is clearly that international criticism of its whaling has mainly taken the form of verbal and/or written statements and proceedings before the IWC or the ICJ. Japan’s Government has consistently ignored or bypassed IWC’s objections and injunctions and dribbled past the ICJ’s judgement of 2014. Moreover, after the judgement, Japan has ruled out the ICJ’s jurisdiction in any dispute “arising out of, concerning, or relating to research on, or conservation, management or exploitation of, living resources of the sea”. Shamefully, no country has taken the kind of deterrent action — for example, those enabled by the United Nations Convention on the law of the Sea and direct intervention in the form of surveillance and heading off of whaling vessels — that would have counted with Japan. Whether this is because of concern with furthering economic ties with Tokyo or not, whales pay the price.
The consequences, including fatality, of swallowing plastic are well-known, as is the fact of the alarming global spread of plastic pollution. The havoc it plays on marine life has once again been underlined by Thon Thamrongnawasawat, a marine biologist who lectures at Thailand’s Kasetsart University, who said that at least 300 marine animals, including pilot whales, sea turtles and dolphins are killed every year in Thai waters after consuming plastic. The total number of deaths worldwide would be much higher because there are innumerable other beaches in the world besides those in Thailand, and millions of plastic bags are thrown from these into adjacent oceans. In fact, 70 per cent of marine debris today is plastic, most of which comes from land.
According to Susan Ronaldson, there are at least 165 million tonnes of plastic in the oceans, with eight million tonnes added annually. She, along with two other women, Jessica Rego and Caroline Wilson, will participate in the annual Talisker Whiskey Challenge race across the Atlantic (a distance of over 3,000 miles) in December this year in a mission to spread awareness of the need to end plastic being thrown into oceans.
Talking of plastic, one must dwell on the wider issue of pollution of which it is a major cause. Pollution is a result of human activity. In a paper titled “Marine Defaunation: Human caused animal loss in oceans”, the authors—Douglas J. McCauley, Malin l. Pinsky, Stephen R Palumbi, James A Estes, Francis H Joyce and Robert R. Warner—state that “marine defaunation” or “human caused animal loss in oceans” today remains mainly driven by human harvest.” The paper, published in Science 347 magazine (2015) further says, “Great whale species, no longer extensively hunted, are now threatened by noise disruption, oil exploration, vessel traffic, and entanglement with moored marine gear.”
There are other factors. Fish farms are destroying mangroves. Bottom trawlers, scraping ocean floors with their nets, had already affected 20,000 square miles and reduced tracts of continental shelves to rubble. The effect of this will be severe. Continental shelves teem with life because sunlight can penetrate their shallow waters and not the depths of oceans, But then, “Trawling may represent just the beginning of our capacity to alter marine habitats. Development of coastal cities, where ~ 40 per cent of the human population lives, has an insatiable demand for coastal land”, reads the paper. Countries like China and the United Arab Emirates have ambitious programmes of constructing artificial land in the oceans to meet this demand.
Such construction and coastal area human populations add both to pollution and adverse modification of marine life habitats. Not surprisingly, the paper in Science 347 states, “Many of the most threatened groups of marine animals are those that directly interact with land (and land-based humans) during some portion of their life history).” Terrestrial contact may also explain why diadromous/ brackish water fishes are more threatened than exclusively marine fishes”
Seabed mining threatens to destroy unique ecosystems besides taking pollution to the deep sea. Contracts covering 460,000 square miles—against zero in 2,000 — have been signed. Rivers bring toxic industrial waste from hinterlands. Oil spills pollute hundreds of square miles. Increasing carbon emission is making sea water acidic and hence inhospitable to marine life. Global warming has worsened matters. The threat it poses to the survival of polar marine fauna is obvious. Further, it has caused a 40 per cent decline in coral reefs besides leading to the migration of some fish to cooler waters. Not all breeds may not be lucky enough to be able to do so and may become extinct. According to the International Programme on the State of the Ocean, acidification, caused by excessive carbon absorption and warming, is making oceans increasingly inhospitable to life, as is de-oxygenation, caused by nutrient run-off resulting from agriculture and climate change.
What is to be doneIJ Marine habitats being increasingly threatened by human intervention, the creation of marine protected areas, where such intervention is severely restricted, can provide much-needed protection to marine species. Unfortunately, the establishment of these has made poor progress covering, as the paper cited states, only about 3.6 per cent of the world’s oceans according to an upper-bound estimate. Further, most marine protected areas remain smaller than the home range size of many marine animals.
This and the fact that protected areas on land, four times larger than their oceanic counterparts, have failed to successfully rein in defaunation, indicate that such areas cannot be the sole answer. One must also ensure that, in areas outside these, seabed mining, energy development, and intensive aquaculture take important marine wildlife habitats into consideration, not vice versa. This is a tall order, but what is at stake is the future of marine wildlife.
(The writer is Consultant Editor, The Pioneer, and an author)
