Now is the Time to Help our Oceans & it's Species !

A pilot whale entangled in a drift gillnet. Fishermen use the massive nets to catch swordfish and thresher sharks, but other animals get caught in the nets and either drown or are tossed overboard. Photo courtesy of NOAA.

Although the plight of the jack mackerel has captured headlines, its troubled story is by no means unique. The health of most commercial fish stock in Chile is best described as catastrophic, said Arancibia. The latest government data on fisheries found that over 70 percent of species are overfished, including jack mackerel, hake, sea bass and anchovy.

“The attacks are very painful and cause large, deep lesions, particularly on the backs of young 2-6 week-old calves.

The whales flinch violently and swim away to flee from the attacking gulls,” Rowntree and Mariano Sironi, Scientific Director of the Instituto de Conservación de Ballenas inArgentina, explain.

“This harassment can last for hours at a time. As a result, right whale mothers and their calves are expending much precious energy during a time-of-year when mothers are fasting and at a site where little to no food is available to replenish fat reserves.

The gull harassment and the extensive wounds they make must have a very negative effect on the health and body condition of these whales and is certainly very stressful.”

As such, development of the Russian Arctic shelf has not begun, and the most important water artery in the Murmansk Region, Kola Bay, is covered with oil film that is so thick that it is easily visible to satellites. And what to do with these slicks so as to stem further pollution – this is a question that remains without a clear answer.

As a result, there is already a deepening problem of hydrocarbon build ups in enormous quantities along the sea floor of Kola Bay. These are the same petroleum products spilled by vessels who opted to hush them up to evade responsibility. As a consequence the oil is just coating the bottom of the sea.

 Using a "patient monitoring" device attached to a whale entangled in fishing gear, scientists showed for the first time how fishing lines changed a whale's diving and swimming behavior. The monitoring revealed how fishing gear hinders whales' ability to eat and migrate, depletes their energy as they drag gear for months or years, and can result in a slow death.

A trophic cascade is an ecological phenomenon triggered by the addition or removal of top predators and involving reciprocal changes in the relative populations of predator and prey through a food chain, which often results in dramatic changes in ecosystem structure and nutrient cycling.

A recent article by Gwynn Guilford in the April 2013 issue of The Atlanticpoints to fishing practices in China as examples of trophic cascade resulting from the extreme over-harvest of sharks for shark-fin soup, several other species with high value as components in various Chinese elixirs and remedies, and the manta ray, also known for its medicinal qualities.

Novice monks are part of the environmental education program run by the Association of Buddhists for the Environment.

All vertebrates have a reflex response to diving (the ‘diving response'), that allows them to limit nitrogen uptake into the blood and body tissues and conserves oxygen, allowing them to dive for longer.

The diving response has two main effects on the body: 1) reduced blood flow to muscles (peripheral vasoconstriction), and 2) reduced heart rate (bradycardia). Both of these limit gas transport around the body, conserving oxygen for the vital organs, and limiting nitrogen uptake by the blood and body tissues. Many marine mammals have the added ability to store gas in their windpipe (trachea) when diving.

The trachea, together with smaller branches in the lungs, are reinforced by rings of cartilage, and when the air sacs within the lungs (alveoli) collapse under pressure, gas is forced out into these strengthened lung cavities, rather than the bloodstream. This prevents excess nitrogen entering the blood as they descend.

Only Ellingsen’s, an old family-run seafood company, remains in business. It’s still prosperous, nowadays turning out 12,000 tons a year of its own locally farmed salmon and, for a few weeks each summer, buying whale meat from the handful of whalers who still work these waters.

“To be honest, whale meat isn’t really commercial for us anymore,” says 42-year-old Ulf Christian Ellingsen, the third generation of his family to run the company.

“We continue to buy it mainly out of respect for tradition and our old roots. My grandfather started this business in 1947 primarily as a whale meat buyer. We’d like to keep that going for as long as we can.”

Skrova’s most significant export these days isn’t salmon or whale but the precious cargo that leaves on the passenger ferry to Svolvær every autumn—a small clutch of schoolchildren who have outgrown the island’s tiny community school and are obliged to pack their bags and leave home to attend the regional high school. For most of them, this introduction into the larger world is the start of a whole new life, one that leads away from Skrova.

The five teenagers who depart Skrova this autumn will be followed by two more next year and another three the year after. And with no youngsters entering school at the other end of the line, the island’s already critically small community school looks set to shrink still further.

Local dolphin watching company Dolphin Adventure spotted a rare Sei whale one mile south west of Europa Point.

At first the crew on board the Dolphin Adventurer thought it was a Minke whale. “It was only after looking closely at the pictures taken by on board biologist Rocio Espada, that we realised what we had seen,” said Captain Angie Watkins.

According to Ms Watkins, the Sei whale is distinguished by faint grey blotches on its skin just around the dorsal fin and it is very rare that we see them near Gibraltar. “Hunted almost to extinction, it is now estimated that there are around 80,000 left worldwide. Japan is one of the few countries that still hunt these mammals despite them being an endangered species,” she adds.