Carl Safina holds a PhD in ecology from Rutgers University and has published over 150 research papers, book chapters, books, and articles on seabird ecology, fisheries, and environmental policy. ...Economic effects largely reflected perceptions by tourists and seafood consumers, and psychological effects resulted from deep uncertainty over ecological effects and consequently the future viability of fishing and tourism. ...the post-leak period when assessment, study, and comparison merged the technological, political, emotional, and scientific components that comprised the event 1.
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Chuckles and Wacky Ideas Carl Safina
Substantia (Firenze),
03/2019, Volume:
3, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Another big group of dolphins had just surfaced alongside our moving vessel —leaping and splashing and calling mysteriously back and forth in their squeally, whistly way, with many babies swift ...alongside their mothers. And this time, confined to just the surface of such deep and lovely lives, I was becoming unsatisfied. I wanted to know what they were experiencing, and why to us they feel so compelling and so—close. This time I allowed myself to ask them the question that for a scientist is forbidden fruit: Who are you? Scientists usually steer firmly from questions about the inner lives of animals. Surely they have inner lives of some sort. But like a child who is admonished that what they really want to ask is impolite, a young scientist is taught that the animal mind—if there is such—is unknowable. Permissible questions are “it” questions: about where it lives, what it eats, what it does when danger threatens, how it breeds. But always forbidden—always forbidden—is the one question that might open the door to the interior: Who? There are good reasons to avoid so fraught an inquiry and the cans of worms such a door could open. But the barrier between humans and animals is artificial, because humans are animals. And now, watching these dolphins, I was tired of being so artificially polite; I wanted more intimacy. I felt time slipping for both of us, and I did not want to risk having to say good-bye and realizing that I’d never really said hello. During the cruise I’d been reading about elephants, and elephant minds were on my own mind as I wondered about the dolphins and watched them pacing fluidly and freely in their ocean realm. When a poacher kills an elephant, he doesn’t just kill the elephant who dies. The family may lose the crucial memory of their elder matriarch, who knew where to travel during the very toughest years of drought to reach the food and water that would allow them to continue living. Thus one bullet may, years later, bring more deaths. Watching dolphins while thinking of elephants, what I realized is: when others recognize and depend on certain individuals, when a death makes the difference for individuals who survive, when relationships define us, we have traveled across a certain blurry boundary in the history of life on Earth—“it” has become “who.” “Who” animals know who they are; they know who their family and friends are. They know their enemies. They make strategic alliances and cope with chronic rivalries. They aspire to higher rank and wait for their chance to challenge the existing order. Their status affects their offspring’s prospects. Their life follows the arc of a career. Personal relationships define them. Sound familiar? Of course. “They” includes us. But a vivid, familiar life is not the domain of humans alone. We look at the world through our own eyes, naturally. But by looking from the inside out, we see an inside-out world. This book takes the perspective of the world outside us—a world in which humans are not the measure of all things, a human race among other races. To understand anything, really, one must go deep, to the roots. In our estrangement from nature we have severed our sense of the community of life and lost touch with the experience of other animals. So while I went in search of particular “who” animals, I delved into new findings about thought, emotion, and consciousness that apply to many animals. And because everything about life occurs along a sliding scale, understanding the human animal becomes easier in context, seeing our human thread woven into the living web among the strands of so many others. This project differs from other “animal thinking” books in one fundamental way. I’d intended to take a bit of a break from my usual writing about conservation issues, to circle back to my first love: simply seeing what animals do, and asking why they do it. I traveled to observe some of the most protected creatures in the world—elephants of Amboseli in Kenya, wolves of Yellowstone in the United States, and killer whales in the waters of the Pacific Northwest—yet in each place I found the animals feeling human pressures that directly affect what they do, where they go, how long they live, and how their families fare. So in this book we encounter the minds of other animals and we listen—to what they need us to hear. The story that tells itself is not just what’s at stake but who is at stake. The greatest realization is that all life is one. I was seven years old when my father and I fixed up a small shed in our Brooklyn yard and got some homing pigeons. Watching how they built nests in their cubbyholes, seeing them courting, arguing, caring for their babies, flying off and faithfully returning, how they needed food, water, a home, and one another, I realized that they lived in their apartments just as we lived in ours. Just like us, but in a different way. Over my lifetime, living with, studying, and working with many other animals in their world and ours has only broadened and deepened —and reaffirmed—my impression of our shared life. That’s the impression I’ll endeavor to share with you in the pages that follow.
Recent research on ocean health has found large predator abundance to be a key element of ocean condition. Fisheries can impact large predator abundance directly through targeted capture and ...indirectly through incidental capture of nontarget species or bycatch. However, measures of the global nature of bycatch are lacking for air-breathing megafauna. We fill this knowledge gap and present a synoptic global assessment of the distribution and intensity of bycatch of seabirds, marine mammals, and sea turtles based on empirical data from the three most commonly used types of fishing gears worldwide. We identify taxa-specific hotspots of bycatch intensity and find evidence of cumulative impacts across fishing fleets and gears. This global map of bycatch illustrates where data are particularly scarce—in coastal and small-scale fisheries and ocean regions that support developed industrial fisheries and millions of small-scale fishers—and identifies fishing areas where, given the evidence of cumulative hotspots across gear and taxa, traditional species or gear-specific bycatch management and mitigation efforts may be necessary but not sufficient. Given the global distribution of bycatch and the mitigation success achieved by some fleets, the reduction of air-breathing megafauna bycatch is both an urgent and achievable conservation priority.
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Hundreds of thousands of seabirds are killed each year as bycatch in longline fisheries. Seabirds are predominantly caught during line setting but bycatch is generally recorded during line hauling, ...many hours after birds are caught. Bird loss during this interval may lead to inaccurate bycatch information. In this 15 year study, seabird bycatch was recorded during both line setting and line hauling from four fishing regions: Indian Ocean, Southern Ocean, Coral Sea and central Pacific Ocean. Over 43,000 albatrosses, petrels and skuas representing over 25 species were counted during line setting of which almost 6,000 seabirds attempted to take the bait. Bait-taking interactions were placed into one of four categories. (i) The majority (57%) of bait-taking attempts were "unsuccessful" involving seabirds that did not take the bait nor get caught or hooked. (ii) One-third of attempts were "successful" with seabirds removing the bait while not getting caught. (iii) One-hundred and seventy-six seabirds (3% of attempts) were observed being "caught" during line setting, with three albatross species - Laysan (Phoebastria immutabilis), black-footed (P. nigripes) and black-browed (Thalassarche melanophrys)- dominating this category. However, of these, only 85 (48%) seabird carcasses were retrieved during line hauling. Most caught seabirds were hooked through the bill. (iv) The remainder of seabird-bait interactions (7%) was not clearly observed, but likely involved more "caught" seabirds. Bait taking attempts and percentage outcome (e.g. successful, caught) varied between seabird species and was not always related to species abundance around fishing vessels. Using only haul data to calculate seabird bycatch grossly underestimates actual bycatch levels, with the level of seabird bycatch from pelagic longline fishing possibly double what was previously thought.
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The Gulf of Mexico is one of the most important ecological regions in the world for birds. The mosaic of diverse habitats in the region provides numerous niches for birds. There are productive salt ...marshes, barrier islands, and sandy beaches for foraging and nesting; a direct pathway between North and Central and South America for migrating; and warm, tropical waters for wintering. Many species are residents all year around, some migrate through, and still others spend the winter along the shores. The Gulf Coast is home to a significant portion of the world’s population of Reddish Egret and Snowy Plover and a significant portion of the US breeding populations of certain birds, including the Sandwich Tern, Black Skimmer, and Laughing Gull. In total, there are more than 400 bird species that rely on the Gulf at some time during the year. Drawing on decades of fieldwork and data research, renowned ornithologist and behavioral ecologist Joanna Burger provides detailed descriptions of birdlife in the Gulf of Mexico. Burger records trends in bird population, behavior, and major threats and stressors affecting birds in the region, including the effects of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010. While some of this data exists in journal articles, research papers, and government reports, this is the first volume to weave together a comprehensive overview of the birds and related natural resources found in the Gulf of Mexico. Illustrated with over 900 color photographs, charts, and maps, this landmark reference volume will be immensely important for researchers, conservationists, land managers, birders, and wildlife lovers.
To some, zoos are prisons exploiting animals. In reality zoos range from bad to better. I make this distinction: A bad zoo makes animals work for it; a good zoo works for animals. Good zoos do ...effective conservation work and continually strive to improve exhibits, relevance to conservation, and inspiring public engagement for wildlife. Many zoos have improved enormously; the better ones being crucial in saving species that would have otherwise gone extinct. Nonetheless, for some people the mere word "zoo" carries impressions of old zoos, bad zoos, circuses, and theme-park shows that many find distasteful. Good zoos know they must innovate forward. As society grows increasingly estranged from nature and continues driving broad declines of wildlife, wild lands, and natural systems, the goal of zoos and every organization concerned with animal welfare should not be to separate humans from other animals, but to entangle all humans in nonhuman lives. Zoos of the next decades must become the first stage in bringing young people into life-long, engaged caring about animals. They could carry on that mission in their communities, in schools, in wild lands, as well as inside their gates. Without a strong public constituency, wild animals will not withstand continued human proliferation. Zoos and aquariums must innovate toward being a crucial force abetting the continued existence of wildness on Earth. Zoos of the future must become uplifting places of respect, rescue, enhancement, conservation, and public engagement.
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The unfolding crises of mass extinction and climate change call for urgent action in response. To limit biodiversity losses and avert the worst effects of climate disruption, we must greatly expand ...nature protection while simultaneously downsizing and transforming human systems. The conservation initiative Nature Needs Half (or Half Earth), calling for the conservation of half the Earth's land and seas, is commensurate with the enormous challenges we face. Critics have objected to this initiative as harboring hardship for people near protected areas and for failing to confront the growth economy as the main engine of global ecological destruction. In response to the first criticism, we affirm that conservation policies must be designed and implemented in collaboration with Indigenous and local communities. In response to the second criticism, we argue that protecting half the Earth needs to be complemented by downscaling and reforming economic life, humanely and gradually reducing the global population, and changing food production and consumption. By protecting nature generously, and simultaneously contracting and transforming the human enterprise, we can create the conditions for achieving justice and well-being for both people and other species. If we fail to do so, we instead accept a chaotic and impoverished world that will be dangerous for us all.
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