Dennis Hollingsworth

Snorkel Report

August has been a bad month for snorkeling here in this part of the Costa Brava. It seemed to begin with the break of the heat wave as rain finally broke the dry spell that had people here so concerned about the combustibility of the local forests. Thirsty earth. And with the first rain, I remember noting the unusual robustness of the runoff from Tossa's streets into the sea.

I waited a few days afterward to let the street water dissipate but the dive was nasty. I hadn't seen water like that since I dived the far end of the Philippine's Subic Bay back in my Navy days (Olongapo City was modeled along the lines of Sodom and Gomorrah and it wasn't a literary impulse that named the local waterway "Shit River".) I will never forget the sight of spent condoms looking anemone-like at a 100 feet, forcing my lips to form a tighter seal on the mouthpiece of the regulator. When I was younger, my father took us to the thousand island national park in Northern Luzon, a vivid memory for me still. Coral in full color spectrum just a short kick down. I heard that it has been destroyed by dynamite fishing since then.

That first August snorkel wasn't much better than that Subic dive. Already the sea was thick due to the Mediterranean's characteristic salinity, but there seemed to be a kind of denser particulate soupyness to it and a considerable amount of debris, much of it plastic -mostly bags, but other trash as well. It was a revolting excursion. No doubt the cause was bigger than the August rain, and I looked toward the shipping lanes on the horizon for the cause, the despicable practice of trash dumping that is unfortunately normal for all seafarers. I showered off carefully after the dive that day.

About a week later, the jellyfish came. In Castellano, they're called medusas, a great name that constantly prompts for me the legend of Perseus. Stephanie sent me a news report on the coming jellyfish invasion in the western Mediterranean. This happened last year as well, but this time they weren't the large white and blue variety, but the smaller yet nastier brown/purple types.

Excursions below the sea were still soured by pollution and the condition of sea life took a hit as the life force of undersea flora and fauna dimmed. A kind of spongy, unattractive foamy moss grew over everything, another sign of inbalance. Schools of fish were fewer, and what I did see seemed to hunker down in small groups on the sea floor. It was other than irritating and more than sad. I opted to take a holiday from snorkeling for a while, letting the crunch of painting absorb most of my attention.

Then I happened to talk to a local lady here, an owner of Roquet de Mar, a nice little pocket hotel around the corner from my house. She was telling me of life back in the old days when Tossa was more of a fishing pueblo than a tourist resort. She spoke of the harvest normal then: octopus the size of small children, tuna as big as doorways to the house, the sea filled with lobsters, mussels, starfish and sardines. So the vibrant undersea life I froliced in at the beginning of summer was but a rump of what had been. Afterward, I talked to a local boy, David, son of the owners of Codolar's chiringuito (beach bar and grill shack) --who was cleaning the surf of jellyfish and dumping them all on the nearby rocks, their gelatinous bodies pulsing with a fading life force-- that the jellyfish invasion happened because the sea turtles were gone, their natural predators.

So today, I did a little googling:

Here's what Greenpeace says what's happening:

In May, Greenpeace published a report which drew the world's attention to the serious depletion of bluefin tuna in the Mediterranean Sea and demonstrating that up to 45,000 tonnes of tuna may have been caught each year in 2004 and 2005, despite the fact that only 32,000 tonnes can be caught legally. During the past month the fishermen Greenpeace has spoken to admitted that quotas are not respected and that there is no effective control over the fishery.
Greenpeace is calling on the countries of the Mediterranean to protect bluefin tuna with marine reserves in their breeding and feeding areas. They would become part of a global network of marine parks across 40% of the world's oceans that are needed to give

Well, I like the idea of marine parks. From what I've read, industry big and small are the culprits, enabled by feeble regulation poorly enforced:

"The Mediterranean is in desperate need of a sea change - literally. The large industrial fishing fleets are out of control, the tuna ranches are out of control, the illegal driftnetters are out of control, even the jellyfish are out of control, partly due to its main predators like tuna and sea turtles being wiped out," said Karli Thomas, of Greenpeace International. "A network of marine reserves would guarantee the protection of the Mediterranean species and their habitat and definitely help to reverse the fishery's decline."

(emphasis mine)
The problem with the industrial farming strategy is that even thought he scale is immense from a human perspective, from the scale of wildlife habitat, it concentrates animate and inanimate material too much, producing a kind of counterproductive blowback:

Furthermore, a new trend - bluefin tuna "farming" - has emerged, with the Spanish as the European leaders. The fish are captured live, placed in cages about 300 meters from the coast of Murcia in southern Spain, and fed until they grow fat. This maximizes the price for each fish: the greater the fat content, the greater the price on the Tokyo fish market. But these fast riches come at a cost. Apart from encouraging more people to catch this scarce fish, bluefin tuna farming is also leading to increased pressure on smaller fish species, such as anchovies and sardinella, which are sold to the farms to feed the tuna. Plus, keeping the cages so close to the coast has led to pollution of the coastal environment, raising the ire of local residents and other fishermen.

Which takes us from the Mediterranean to the Tokyo fish market (a place I haven't seen yet, and I intend to visit next March):

The price of a prize red tuna can top 50,000 euros (60,000 dollars) on the Japanese market.

It's going to be a sad day when I belly up to the sushi bar and take a pass on an order of Toro sushi. I'll have to drown my sorrows with Unagi, California rolls and a little saki. At least we haven't figured out how to large scale industrial farm eels (or avocados, unfortunately)... yet.

( Image Source)

postscript: Imagine my surprise when I came across this post from the estimable blog EU Referendum which draws a connection from the problem of the illegal immigration by desperate African refugees across the sea towards Europe to the mismanagement of fisheries by the EU (the tuna/jellyfish connection):

That is the measure of the failure of the media as it records, yet again, the surge in illegal immigration from West Africa to the Canaries in small boats across the perilous Atlantic, the Guardian, amongst others, reporting, "15 Bodies Found on Mauritanian Beach", believed to be would-be immigrants washed ashore after a failed attempt to reach the Canaries.

As we detailed in May, here and again here, the forced migration is almost entirely due to the collapse of the artisan fishing industries in Mauritania and Senegal.

This is in very large part due to the predatory EU third country fishing agreements exacerbated by the EU's failure to assist in developing effective conservation systems and enforcement measures to deal with non-EU fishing vessels which are also raiding the fishing stocks.

(emphasis mine, again)
The story was framed by the larger problem of a sputtering, misleading and hollowed out mainstream media.

If you aren't surfing for your news, you aren't getting any.

Posted by Dennis at September 3, 2006 7:02 PM