www.elsevier.com/locate/marpolbul

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