Song for the Blue Ocean: Encounters Along the World's Coasts and Beneath the Seas
480
Song for the Blue Ocean: Encounters Along the World's Coasts and Beneath the Seas
480eBook
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Overview
Part odyssey, part pilgrimage, this epic personal narrative follows the author's exploration of coasts, islands, reefs, and the sea's abyssal depths. Scientist and fisherman Carl Safina takes readers on a global journey of discovery, probing for truth about the world's changing seas, deftly weaving adventure, science, and political analysis.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781429984263 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Holt, Henry & Company, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 04/01/2010 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 480 |
| Sales rank: | 790,016 |
| File size: | 945 KB |
About the Author
Carl Safina, author of The View from Lazy Point: A Natural Year in an Unnatural World, Voyage of the Turtle: In Pursuit of the Earth's Last Dinosaur, Eye of the Albatross: Visions of Hope and Survival, Song for the Blue Ocean: Encounters Along the World's Coasts and Beneath the Seas, and founder of the Blue Ocean Institute, was named by the Audubon Society one of the leading conservationists of the twentieth century. He's been profiled by The New York Times, and PBS's Bill Moyers. His books and articles have won him a Pew Fellowship, Guggenheim Award, Lannan Literary Award, John Burroughs Medal, and a MacArthur Prize. He lives in Amagansett, New York.
Carl Safina's work has been recognized with MacArthur, Pew, and Guggenheim Fellowships, and his writing has won Orion, Lannan, and National Academies literary awards and the John Burroughs, James Beard, and George Rabb medals. He has a PhD in ecology from Rutgers University.
Safina is the inaugural holder of the endowed chair for nature and humanity at Stony Brook University, where he co-chairs the steering committee of the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science and is founding president of the not-for-profit Safina Center. He hosted the 10-part PBS series Saving the Ocean with Carl Safina. His writing appears in The New York Times, National Geographic, Audubon, Orion, and other periodicals and on the Web at National Geographic News and Views, Huffington Post, and CNN.com.
Carl's books include Voyage of the Turtle, Becoming Wild, and The View from Lazy Point.
Read an Excerpt
Song for the Blue Ocean
Encounters Along the World's Coasts and Beneath the Seas
By Carl Safina
Henry Holt and Company
Copyright © 1997 Carl SafinaAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4299-8426-3
CHAPTER 1
The Gulf of Maine
"I think there may be something to show you here," Charlie Horton is saying through my headphones. Horton likes the color of this water. After flying over miles of oceanic desert, skimming wave upon wave unrelieved, this blue oasis is coming alive for us, finally.
Two sleek finback whales are plowing furrows in the surface below us, at an uncommonly swift pace. Charlie banks his airplane for a better look. As he's visually locked onto them, I glance down between the struts and am startled to see a school of very, very big fish. "Right here! Right here!"
Horton banks hard and the plane wheels in a tight, gut-jumping circle. "Yup, tuna!" he says. "Good ones! Some five-hundred-pounders in that bunch." About a hundred giant bluefin tuna are traveling peacefully just under the surface. The animals I am looking at are so large, I expect them to behave like dolphins; that they are not coming to the surface to breathe air feels somehow uncomfortable. I have to remind myself — it seems so odd — that these large creatures are truly fish.
Close your eyes. Think fish. Do you envision half a ton of laminated muscle rocketing through the sea as fast as you drive your automobile? Do you envision a peaceful warrior capable of killing you unintentionally with a whack of its tail? These giant tuna strain the concept of fish. "Fish," anyhow, is a matter of dry taxonomy, the discipline that tells more of your origins than of who you are now. "Fish" is a label, like your surname that relates you to both your disgraceful uncle and your extraordinary cousin, yet says nothing of you. Name is not destiny. Your relationship to those around you — your ecology, if you will — defines you in the moment.
The giant tuna rise in unison, their backs breaking wakes like a flotilla of small boats. As they continue cruising, one of them splashes and sprints forward a few yards, like a thoroughbred jittery before a race, its behavior hinting strongly of enormous power in repose. What sense of the world, what feeling, moves this animal? Is it impatient? Is it thinking?
Questions large and small come forward. The airplane turns a slow arc.
Below, in plain sight, swim giant creatures from another dimension, confined below the surface no less than we are confined above it. They feel not the breeze but the tides; they have never pressed a solid surface; they breathe by moving forward and can never rest. How may we know them?
Charlie watches the bluefins a moment and jots a note about their number and location. Charlie Horton is a professional fish spotter, finding bluefin tuna and swordfish from the air, then guiding a commercial fishing boat to them. Today, though, Charlie isn't working with a boat. He has only me to worry about. I have formally requested that the National Marine Fisheries Service and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service begin a process that could end commercial fishing for bluefin tuna. But I've arranged to come fishing (as Charlie refers to flying) with him and with others in New England, because many fishermen insist that bluefin numbers are increasing and that the petition should be withdrawn. I want to see if I can get their sense of things, and try to understand their lives and livelihoods a little.
We continue onward, hurtling over the shimmer, searching, scanning. White bursts — these too may be giant bluefins — draw our attention. Rather than tuna, several hundred white-sided dolphins come into focus, undulating crisply through the sea surface below. They glide up to snatch breath without breaking stride, then run along submerged, until coming easily again for the next inspiration of air. All this they do in one fluent movement, seemingly having as little need to think about breathing as we. Their fluid maneuvers are excruciatingly beautiful, a living embroidery of motion through the ocean's wrinkled cloth. Having never watched dolphins from the air before, I am surprised that the animals are not evenly spaced. Certain individuals consort more closely together than others. I wonder if these are parents with their grown offspring, families, relatives, perhaps friends. Behind and following the dolphins, crisscrossing and coursing just above the waves, flies a loose flock of shearwaters, oceanic wanderers who touch land only when nesting. A blue shark appears, lazily wagging its way along just beneath the surface.
All the animals gathered in this one area have my riveted attention, but Charlie sheers away, and we continue along at 107 knots.
For the next thirty miles, we see little but ocean and sky. Charlie scans intently and tirelessly, as many square miles of sea surface pass beneath us. The shimmer mesmerizes me. After what seems a long while, Charlie says, "Look west."
A couple of miles away, the activity of half a dozen whales whitens a small area in the rolling blue universe. Another isolated oasis. A hundred and twenty miles an hour is fast, and we cover the distance to the whales in a blink. Now at least a dozen finbacks and humpbacks trouble the surface below, over an area perhaps four miles in diameter. One humpback breaches and crashes back, sending up an astonishing geyser of spray and foam. Remarks Charlie, "When you see whales like this, you could see tuna anywhere around here."
Up ahead, an enormous finback is doing some heavy breathing at the surface, sending up columns of steamy vapor each time it exhales. Signaling a deep dive with its arching back, the whale sounds straightaway like an arrow, out of sight. Directly below, two humpbacks, a mother and calf, erupt suddenly through the surface, blowing hard. Another mother and calf soon follow, up from infinity. We watch the whales moving along beneath the surface between breaths, their long and slender pectoral fins waving like the graceful arms of dancers. The whales roll forward in unison, lifting their massive tail flukes toward the sky, then flowing seamlessly into a sounding dive, digging straight down into very clear water for a few wonderfully extended seconds, before finally dissolving into that deep eternal indigo.
Charlie goes into a search pattern. His judgment that this is a place worth scrutinizing pays off. We spot a school of a dozen giant bluefins and turn hard to circle them. Their movements appear stiff, as though their massive musculature is packed into too tight a skin. Autumn is upon us, and after summering on rich feeding grounds, the bluefins are nearing their fattest. The big fish swim tautly. Their tails — sickle shaped, capable of flexion but stiff, fibrous like fiberglass — wag ever so slightly. I am looking down at a pod of zeppelins reshaped for speed. Were Atlas to put down the world for a moment and pick up a giant bluefin, it would balance in his fingers like a dart, with its greatest mass gathered up front, to carry the momentum and deliver the impact. Widest just behind the head, the animals I am watching taper rapidly toward their propelling tails. When a giant bluefin tuna decides to move, it does not so much swim through the water as split it like a wedge.
Charlie asks whether his abrupt maneuvering is making me queasy. His questioning brings me back inside my body, and I realize that the engine noise, the vibration, and the frequent sharp banking and rapid changes in altitude are getting to my stomach a little bit.
We head off to the southeast, crossing miles of featureless water over many long minutes, scanning, always scanning. Each time we go searching, my stomach recovers. Each time we find life and begin to bank hard and wheel, queasiness returns.
Off in the eastern distance, a hundred or so shearwaters and gulls are sitting on the water in scattered groups, like salt and pepper on a blue plate. We investigate. A dead whale, well decomposed, hangs vertically, producing a slick that runs for miles. Charlie banks tightly and swoops in. My poor stomach gives another tug. I dig into my sweatshirt for a package of little crackers and unthinkingly toss a handful toward my mouth; they bounce off of my headset's featherweight mouthpiece and scatter on the cabin floor.
Several large, well-gorged blue sharks — "blue dogs" as Charlie calls them — lounge with languid leisure in the fetid slick. They exemplify carnivorous contentment. Most assuredly, this is blue shark heaven. When blue dogs die, they must hope to go to the big, reeking whale carcass in the sky. Charlie only glances at the sharks, but he watches the birds' behavior carefully. These birds prey on the same fish and squid as do the tuna, and birds' behavior can betray tuna hunting near the surface. Charlie tells me that once, while watching shearwaters swimming underwater, feeding on small herring, he saw one of them get hit by a blue shark during a dive. "When the shearwater come to the surface, one wing was not working. He began going in circles. The shark appeared, chasing that bird round and round like you wouldn't believe. Finally wore the shearwater out and nailed him." Blue shark heaven can be shearwater hell. We leave the scene.
A plump humpback, grand and beautiful, pops out at about two o'clock, to the south, idly doing barrel rolls in the water. Charlie notices an enormous streak of subtle color deep under the whale and explains, "That streak is a big school of sand eels that the whale's been feeding on." Tuna eat sand eels too, so we check this area carefully.
Charlie circles tightly, and centrifugal forces make themselves felt in my abdomen. Two "little" twenty-five-foot-long minke whales ("minke" rhymes with "kinky") surface nearby. With their white-tipped flippers, the minkes look like they're playing Ping-Pong. They abruptly disappear. Minkes were of no interest to whale hunters until the much larger whales were reduced to near extinction. Now actively hunted by Norwegians and the Japanese, who disingenuously say they hunt them "for scientific purposes," their meat is consumed in Japan. The hunts are used as a pretext for killing other, highly endangered, protected whales, whose meat is then labeled "minke" — as DNA tests of whale meat from Japanese markets have proved. These minkes, though, remain safe from whale hunters at present.
A basking shark, gray and huge, comes into focus as though entering from the Dreamtime. Estimated length: thirty feet. It slices a slit with its immense dorsal fin. Like the great whales, this gentle giant subsists on tiny animals, straining them from the water with the cave that is its mouth. The placid monster swims unhurriedly at the surface, a life within temporal and spatial dimensions we can only begin to guess at.
Several small pods of giant tuna appear near the surface not far from the basking shark. Inexplicably and impressively, some of the giants come through the surface and crash. Horton, who has seen this a thousand times, cheers. These massive tuna are magnificent animals.
We have covered a lot of territory this morning, and seen remarkable things. Accustomed to plodding along the sea surface in a boat, I find the airplane's great speed, which allows us to cover so vast an area and find so many pockets of life at such a breathtaking pace, literally a new experience of space and time. A fish spotter can cover, apparently, the entire Gulf of Maine in a day, keeping close tabs on where, in the moving waters, the life is concentrated.
Having come all the way across the Gulf to an area east of Provincetown, Massachusetts, Horton is heading us down to Chatham, at the elbow of Cape Cod, for lunch. He asks what I want to eat, so he can radio our order ahead. All I can think of is crackers to settle my stomach. Horton turns the aircraft to the southwest, and the outline of Cape Cod appears vaguely in the hazy distance. "That last bunch of tuna was really nice; six- or seven-hundred-pounders. Jeez they were beautiful," he says as he reaches for the funnel and "relief tube" that drains to the outside of the aircraft. "I can fly forever when the sky and sea are this gorgeous. In the air, looking for fish — I love this. Every time I come up here, I thank the Lord."
Amen.
Earlier this morning, when I was a poorer man than I am now, I drove to the Sanford, Maine, airport and met Charlie Horton for the first time. Horton relies on finding bluefin tuna for a significant part of his income, but according to the Atlantic tuna commission, the bluefin's breeding population has dropped nearly 90 percent in just fifteen years, and many scientists expect continued decline. The National Audubon Society has recently petitioned the government to list the bluefin under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, usually called CITES (pronounced SIGH-tees). This would effectively suspend commercial fishing for bluefin. I wrote the petition. I did so after American and Japanese representatives to the tuna commission told me that, despite the precipitous decline reported to them by their own scientists, they had no intention of reducing bluefin catch quotas.
The commission's formal name is the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas. It is usually referred to by its acronym, ICCAT (pronounced EYE-cat). ICCAT comprises roughly twenty member Atlantic-rim countries, plus Japan, which is both a major fisher of Atlantic tunas and the major importer and consumer of bluefins. Founded in the late 1960s, the commission assumed authority for "tunas and tuna-like species," including marlins and swordfish. The commission's charter mandates that it manage for "maximum sustainable yield," meaning, essentially, the most fish that can be taken from a healthy population without causing it to slide into long-term decline.
But according to the commission's own scientific reports, most species the commission has authority for have, in fact, declined sharply since the 1970s. Species now at their lowest levels in history include: bluefin tuna, blue marlin, white marlin, eastern Atlantic yellowfin tuna, albacore tuna, bigeye tuna, and swordfish. Though the commission claims to be "managing" the fisheries, the only catch quotas it has are for the bluefin and for swordfish. But those quotas have always been much higher than the commission's scientists recommended — and much higher than the populations could withstand. The commission has in effect presided over the depletion of many of the Atlantic's big fishes. This illustrious resume suggests that the acronym ICCAT might as well stand for International Conspiracy to Catch All the Tunas.
I wrote the bluefin petition with the hope that one international treaty organization — CITES — could force another international treaty organization — ICCAT — to act responsibly. Ideally, threat of action under CITES — which could categorize the fish as endangered — will pressure the tuna commission into reducing catches enough to let the bluefin population rebuild. In the long term, many more people would benefit from a rebuilt bluefin population — as, of course, would the fish themselves. The downside is that until the population rebuilds, people who fish for a living — good, decent, hardworking people — could be financially hurt by lowered catch quotas. But the same people will be hurt anyway if the tuna commission refuses to reduce catches and the bluefin declines even further. It is a situation that could have been avoided had the tuna commission lived up to its responsibilities and its name all these years.
But that is only my opinion. And it is based largely on the assumption that the scientific information developed by the tuna commission is accurate. Millions of dollars ride on that question. A CITES listing for bluefin tuna would suspend exports of the fish between the east coast of North America and Japan, the major market. Animals listed on CITES's Appendix I, such as the African elephant, are considered to be in danger of extinction, and they or their parts may not be brought across national boundaries. This is the mechanism that banned international trade in ivory. If the bluefin were to be listed and the fish barred from export, the price would crumble. At U.S. prices, fishing for days or weeks to catch one rare giant bluefin tuna, as is done now, would no longer be profitable, and the fishery would become commercially extinct.
But with the Japanese market, the bluefin is worth fantastic money. Fishers can be paid, depending on the quality and condition of the individual fish, more than $50 per pound for a fish that can weigh hundreds of pounds (the largest bluefin tuna on record weighed nearly 1,500 pounds). Although the mighty bluefin tuna is capable of trans-Atlantic migrations, probably more bluefins from the east coast of North America cross the Pacific, because the next step in the transaction is a one-way air-freight ticket to Tokyo. Here wholesalers auction the fish to retailers. One bluefin tuna recently sold for $83,500, nearly $117 per pound. The 715-pound giant was to be reduced to 2,400 servings of sushi, which, because of the exceptional quality of this individual fish, would be served to elite businessmen and government officials for $75 per serving, bringing in, altogether, an estimated $180,000. One fish.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Song for the Blue Ocean by Carl Safina. Copyright © 1997 Carl Safina. Excerpted by permission of Henry Holt and Company.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,Epigraph,
Preface,
BOOK ONE - Northeast,
The Gulf of Maine,
Ogunquit,
Cape cod Bay,
Shores of Three Continents,
South of Block,
BOOK TWO - Northwest,
Yaquina Head,
Yachats,
Valley of Giants, Mountains of Gods,
on the ground,
Astoria,
Columbia gorge,
The Dalles and Umatilla,
Golden State,
BOOK THREE - Far Pacific,
Malakal,
Koror,
Ollei,
Hong Kong,
Sulu,
Epilogue,
Acknowledgments,
Move,
Praise,
Selected Bibliography,
Index,
Copyright Page,
Related Subjects
Customer Reviews
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