Year of the Ocean |
In March, the Philippines banned killing or selling whale sharks and manta rays, and threatened fines and imprisonment for lawbreakers. The government is concerned because too many people are eating too many sharks and rays, according to a March 30 article by Environmental News Network (ENN).
At the same time, half a world away in southern Peru, thousands of sea lions had washed ashore to die because El Nino has deprived them of their food source, fish. Sea lions were also suffering from malnutrition on the beaches of Chile. Worse, many of the dead sea lions are adult females, which means recovery of the breeding population will take several years, according to another March 30 Environmental News Network (ENN) story.
In the Baltic Sea region, nine nations agreed to put a plug on waste dumping in the Baltic. Ships will be required to drop their sewage, rubbish and fuel residues at their first port of call. In turn, those ports will be taught to manage these wastes.
Meanwhile, SeaWorld created a whale of a story when it released the briefly famous J.J. the gray whale into the Pacific Ocean. J.J., in case you were asleep, was found stranded off a California beach in January 1997. Weighing in at 1,670 pounds and 13 feet, 10 inches long, J.J. thrived in captivity and put on another 16,530 pounds and about 16 more feet (length not appendages).
Sounds like good news and bad news. An old story. Only, there seems to be more bad news than good. Numerous fisheries are reportedly in serious danger of collapse. The lobster fishery off the coast of Maine, for example, concerns many scientists because females without eggs are being caught. This means both that the stock of large lobsters is depleted and that the taking of immature females threatens the future of the entire fishery.
In Long Beach, Calif., fishermen protested proposed Channel Island restrictions by the National Park Service to limit fishing. The National Marine Fisheries Service recently set a new minimum size for Atlantic blue marlin and Atlantic white marlin to reduce marlin landings by 25 percent.
Faced with all the bad news about oceans, the United Nations declared 1998 the International Year of the Ocean to increase public awareness of the world's oceanic problems. Back in 1990 during the Year of the Coast, public information efforts were largely restricted to posters and education programs in schools, museums and nature centers. In 1998, however, we have the Web, and what a difference this makes. The ocean has a web site!
For teachers and everyone else interested in learning more,
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