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Marine Pollution Bulletin 49 (2004) 881–882
Editorial
And they call such pillage ‘‘fishing’’
This summer of 2004, the media in Great Britain has
been concerned with the excesses of (some) animal rightsactivists who have targeted for harassment and abuse
scientists and other workers at animal testing facilities
such as Huntingdon Life Sciences in Cambridge. The
Government is planning a crackdown on such ‘‘terror-
ists’’ and the City is reported to be offering huge rewards
for information leading to the convictions of the extrem-
ists following the loss from Britain of billions of pounds
worth of research and development money involvinganimal testing. The pharmaceutical industry, for exam-
ple, insists that it is in the best interests of human beings
that any new drugs are tested on animals first. Most
(>80%) test animals too are rats and mice bred specifi-
cally for experimentation upon and I believe that it is
in science�s best interests to care for the welfare of such
animals. If one doesn�t, all such experiments are useless
anyway.The above debate, however, has led me to think
about our treatment of other vertebrates, notably fish,
but also birds, reptiles and mammals, in the sea under
the guise of ‘‘fishing’’. In 2003, the European Union
banned all driftnet fishing in the Baltic to, ostensibly,
protect tuna and swordfish stocks, but also accidentally
trapped and killed dolphins and, especially, the local
population of Harbour porpoise. Drowning for a mar-ine mammal must be a truly horrible protracted death.
In 2004 too, the European Union banned fishing in its
waters for sharks with the sole object of hacking off their
fins (and throwing the still living but helpless animals
overboard) for sale to Hong Kong and the lucrative
Asian market. In China, illegal factories use, if you
can believe it, the cancer causing industrial strength
hydrogen peroxide to bleach the fins. Still, however,the trade continues to grow so that now many shark spe-
cies are considered endangered. Again, each year, 200
million wild caught seahorses are traded worldwide with
most going to China where they are dried for herbal
medicines. But, really, does anyone seriously believe that
a dried sea horse is a cure for a flagging libido and infer-
0025-326X/$ - see front matter � 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.marpolbul.2004.10.006
tility? To put such trading in perspective, however, offi-
cial statistics show that in 2003 tiny Hong Kong
imported, mainly for food, �6.8 million live wild ani-
mals (in addition to marine fish), that is, roughly oneeach for the city�s population. Although these mostly
comprised (freshwater) turtles, frogs, lizards and snakes,
it also included live reef fish—a trade that is killing
Indo-Pacific reef communities (Morton, 2002). As an
example, in early May 2004, Malaysia�s marine police
operating in the South China Sea, arrested 16 illegal
fisherman on a boat registered in Hainan Island, China,
with 160 dead endangered turtles on board which werethought to have been poisoned using cyanide as are
the reef fish.
Also in 2004, it was first reported that deep water
trawling, to depths of 1500m, is destroying reefs of
non-zooxanthellate corals, whereas it has been known
for decades that dynamite fishing, in concert with trawl-
ing and cyanide fishing, is decimating tropical herma-
typic reefs. The European Union may be attempting tocontrol fishing in its own territorial waters, but, under
the guise of trade agreements and aid, member states,
notably Spain but also Great Britain, pay coastal Afri-
can countries money to be allowed to trawl the national
waters of, for example, Senegal, Angola, Somalia, the
Ivory Coast and, now, Namibia.
In the Southern Ocean, where mid-water trawling has
been replaced by long line fishing with baited hooks(reportedly to protect dolphins and seals), it is estimated
that such fishing on a virtual industrial scale kills some
100,000 albatrosses each year. The lines themselves
may be 80km long and for every hooked parent bird,
a chick will also die. All 21 species of the birds are
now considered endangered.
In the 18th century, enthusiastic whalers in the north-
east Pacific hunted Stellar�s sea cow, within but 27 yearsof its discovery, to extinction. The Sea otter too was
hunted almost to extinction, interestingly resulting in
the sale of Alaska by Russia to the USA for US$7 mil-
lion in 1867, but was rescued after enactment of an inter-
national treaty in 1911 between the USA, Britain,
Russia, Canada and Japan that excluded the species
882 Editorial / Marine Pollution Bulletin 49 (2004) 881–882
from commercial hunting. Alaska�s Sea otter population
recovered to between 100,000 and 137,000 individuals in
the 1980s but has since fallen by about 95%, that is, to
�5000 animals. It is unknown what is causing the de-
cline but one interesting and controversial theory sug-
gests that over fishing, including the hunting ofwhales, sea lions and seals prior to and in the 1970s,
so decimated the natural prey of Killer whales that they
have turned instead to attacking the otters. Fishing also
had to be curtailed to save the western Alaskan Stellar
sea lion, listed as endangered in 1997, and it may well
be this activity too is a factor indirectly responsible for
the decline in Sea otter numbers.
In 2004, on the other side of the North American con-tinent, the government of Canada allowed the culling, by
clubbing, of 350,000 Harp seal pups for their furs. In the
1970s and 1980s, conservationists effectively halted this
annual cull and the wearing of furs was politically incor-
rect. But, with growing markets in Russia and Poland for
the silvery pelts, the hunters are back on the ice with a
vengeance. And now scientists will have to try to deci-
pher what the impact of such culling is, through complexecological intertwinings, on the food web of the north-
west Atlantic and beyond. What, moreover, I wonder
would be the general public�s reaction if this were the
way newborn lambs were slaughtered throughout the
English countryside? In the same vein, the International
Whaling Commission debated at its annual conference in
Sorrento, Italy, this summer whether or not harpooning
was inhumane. The Icelandic delegates apparently con-sider that it doesn�t hurt much! Where are the environ-
mental activists who and the public protests that, a
generation ago, turned the Western public face against
killing whales and wearing seal furs?
Some activists are not so far away as you might
imagine, however. On 30 July 2004, The Times of Lon-
don reported that ‘‘The Lobster Liberation Front’’ had
claimed responsibility for damaging one fisherman�sequipment in sleepy Swanage, Dorset, prompting the
‘‘Southern Animal Rights Coalition’’ to declare ‘‘war
against the lobster industry has begun’’. How a lobster
dies (by boiling), may be of great concern to such ani-
mal right�s activists, but I think that there is, out in the
wider world, a much bigger problem of (i) massive
over-fishing on an unprecedented scale; (ii) extreme
cruelty, perhaps not to fish for which it must be diffi-
cult to find a more humane way of killing them, that
is, drowning in air, but to reptiles, birds and mammals
that die in ways which would not be countenanced on
land (with the notable exceptions of fox hunting and
hare coursing), that is, callously and with no compas-sion, and (iii) what must be incredible ecological dam-
age on a global scale that we can in reality only guess
the consequences of.
We know that trawling and long-lining, in fact almost
all fishing methods, have impacts upon the ecology of
the marine environment: what we have little information
on, however, is how much. Fisheries scientists and ecol-
ogists, starved of funds and facilities, can only attemptto quantify what is perhaps impossible. Today, it is
‘‘open season’’ on the world�s seas in terms of fishing.
But it is not ‘‘fishing’’ it is reckless plunder by fishermen
who are either deliberately or of necessity blind to the
long-term consequences of their actions. And with few
exceptions, such as the Australian Government�s com-
mitment to halting the illegal poaching in its territorial
waters of Patagonian toothfish (Morton, 2004), officialsand politicians have turned a blind eye to such pillage.
Never before has the saying ‘‘out of sight, out of mind’’
been so apt a description of what is happening to our
common marine resources. Out there, in every corner
of the oceans, the Tragedy of the Commons is being re-
peated on a scale that defies the imagination. Are we
incapable of ever learning?
References
Morton, B., 2002. What price Asian fish soon? Marine Pollution
Bulletin 44, 263–265.
Morton, B., 2004. Pollution of a more sinister kind. Marine Pollution
Bulletin 48, 1–2.
Brian Morton
Department of Aquatic Life Sciences
The Western Australian Museum
Francis Street
Perth, Western Australia
Australia
E-mail address: prof bsmorton@hotmail:com