Diving Thoughts

In recent years, we seem to be seeing more and more lionfish in Hong Kong, and they are very welcome as they add a nice splash of colour to a dive. Not so in the Atlantic where they are eating vast amounts of young fish around coral reefs. Studies seem to show that their prey make no attempt to avoid them, presumably because they are a new, unfamiliar predator in the western Atlantic and Caribbean.  Their victims include species that keep algae from overwhelming reefs, adding further pressure to the corals.

Sharks and other predators seem to avoid the pacific lionfish, whose population has exploded and is having a significant impact in the Bahamas and Cuba. And their range continues to expand.

Researchers are hoping that eventually native Atlantic species will react to the new invader, but that could take a long time. In some places divers are being asked to help control them, with tournaments to see who can bring back the most lionfish. One enterprising US company is trying to market lionfish to restaurants as an exotic dish.

You can read more from the Guardian’s website.

To help celebrate World Ocean Day, Ecovision and the Canadian Chamber of Commerce are hosting a lunch panel discussion on Monday 7th June at the Mira Hong Kong Hotel in TST. In the evening they are also showing Sharkwater, and the special guest will be the film’s director, Rob Stewart.

For more information, go to their website.

There have been a lot more dead turtles than usual washed up on beaches in the Gulf of Mexico. Inevitably there is speculation that this is related to the explosion and oil spill at the Deepwater Horizon drilling platform on 22nd April.

22,000 barrels of oil per day are still leaking from the well and there is a major concern about the damage to environment and to wildlife. At the moment the authorities have not confirmed whether the increased number of turtle deaths is directly related to the oil spill or just a coincidence but they will be conducting autopsies on the bodies.

There is more on the Guardian’s website.

Taiji is the town in  Japan that was featured in the Oscar-winning documentary, the Cove, which I was fortunate enough to see a few weeks ago when SCDC showed it at one of their Thursday Club nights.I had been expecting it to focus on the gory dolphin clubbing. It did lead up to that, but the gore only formed a very small part of what was quite a powerful film, which, somewhat unexpectedly, I enjoyed.

Today the BBC website has an article by a girl who worked as a dolphin trainer in Taiji in the 1990′s. In it she writes of her reaction to the film and gives quite a lot of background on what happened there, and what it was like to work with captive dolphins. She is now opposed to dolphin hunting, and hopes that more Japanese people will see The Cove to raise awareness of what is going on.

The article is on the BBC website.

Here’s a photo showing the crystal-clear, turquoise waters of the Barrier Reef, being  marred somewhat by the presence of dirty brown coalship, Shen Neng 1, before she was towed off the reef. She has now been anchored 70km away near Great Keppel Island.

On 3rd April, the coal carrier ran aground on Douglas Shoal, which is in protected waters. Two men, believed to be the ship’s master and the chief officer-on-watch, have been arrested amid speculation that the ship failed to turn at a waypoint. As a result the ship has left a gash 3km long and 250 metres wide in the reef. Some oil has washed up in a nearby wildlife sanctuary.

Diver inspects gouges left in the reef.

There are a number of stories all over the Internet, including from New Zealand Herald, where these photos came from, Sydney Morning Herald, and the BBC.

WWF‘s latest newsletter has said that Yagura, the Japanese restaurant in the Eaton Hotel, Hong Kong, has pledged to take bluefin tuna off its menu. This is the first Japanese restaurant to do so in Hong Kong and WWF are hopeful that others will follow their lead.

You can continue to support WWF’s campaign here.

In support of Earth Hour, we are all being encouraged to turn lights off from 8:30pm on Sat 27th March 2010 for one hour. This is intended to show the stand millions of people around the world are making against climate change.

You can find out more about it on the WWF – Hong Kong website.

An 18 foot whale shark was found last week in Bahay Kambing, a cove in the municipality of Tingloy, by some divers, including several from Hong Kong. Its dorsal and pectoral fins had all been cut off and there were rope marks on its tail. It was towed to Caban cove which was calmer and volunteers tried to help it. Unfortunately it died in the night from its injuries.

Having been fortunate enough to see a similarly sized whale shark in Thailand, this is very sad.

Whale sharks are classified as vulnerable by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), and they are protected under Philippine law. Unfortunately that doesn’t seem to have made much difference in this case.

The photo above was taken from WWF-Philippines website, where they have a long article on this.

Here’s another photo and a link to an article, this time from the Philippine Star’s website.

I’ve also seen a number of photos on Facebook, so the incident is becoming more widely reported worldwide.

There’s also a thread on Scubaboard’s forum.

According to a couple of the articles I read, “locals” have suggested that the whale shark may have become entangled in a fishing net, and had its fins off in order to recover the net! Several years ago in Hong Kong during a shallow night dive a bunch of squid fishermen turned up. Since lights attract the squid, they no doubt concluded that underwater dive lights would be even better at attracting them, so they dropped nets around 3 pairs of divers. It’s a good job they didn’t apply the same logic as these Philippine “locals”, otherwise we’d have got 6 divers back with no arms and legs left.

Presumably if these “locals” are to be believed and saving the nets were the priority, the fins would have been discarded and no-one would dream of selling them for USD 800 per kilo. And I’m not convinced that under Philippine law that it makes any difference why you kill a protected animal, it is still illegal. I don’t think I’m alone in that view as apparently WWF-Philippines and the Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources (BFAR) have announced a reward of P100,000 to anyone who can provide information leading to the arrest of the people involved.

The Standard are reporting that Elizabeth Quat will become the first woman from Hong Kong to be involved in a diving expedition to the Antarctic for research purposes. The article isn’t actually clear on whether she will actually be diving there, or whether she is the first Hong Kong woman on a diving expedition there or just the first on a diving expedition “for research”. All in all they don’t give us much news to go on, although their photo does show some diving gear and a camera housing.

She will apparently be a photographer as part of Project Elysium which will “document the vista, flora and fauna of the Antarctic Peninsula”. This is done with a view to raise awareness of climate change. It should be a great trip, so good luck to Ms  Quat. Hopefully we’ll have some great photos to show later.

You can read the article on the Standard website, from where the photo above came.

Dense superswarms of krill form in the Southern Ocean and some can stretch for tens of kilometres. Krill are shrimp-like crustaceans such as the Antarctic krill (Euphausia superba).

Scientists have discovered that there are two main types of swarms. The smaller ones may be  up to 50 metres long  and 4 metres deep, with an average density of 10 krill per cubic metre.  These are usually made up of adult krill, which are negatively buoyant. This means they have to swim to keep afloat, which takes up energy and means they need to eat more. But while a swarm offers some protection against predators, it means they are also competing for food, which could be why these adult swarms are not larger or more dense.

The second type of swarms are much bigger and also much denser. These tend to be formed of juvenile krill which are buoyant and so need less energy.

One worrying aspect is the possible impact of overfishing, if most krill in the Southern Ocean are gathered in a few very large superswarms. Fishing fleets can effectively locate these superswarms and by fishing them out could remove the majority of krill living in the ocean, which would have a dramatic effect on other species and the environment.

The next thing scientists may have to look at is why the largest swarms form at night, when the animals would typically be feeding and people had expected them to disperse.

The above photo comes from an article on the BBC’s website.

President Mohamed Nasheed (pictured) of the Maldives and 11 of his ministers held the world’s first underwater cabinet meeting. They were all in diving gear at a depth of 4 metres. It was a PR stunt to raise awareness of global warming which could result in sea level changes that could flood the Maldives and make it uninhabitable. The immediate target is to focus attention on trying to get a better deal at the upcoming climate summit in Copenhagen.

The ministers sat around a horseshoe shaped table at 10am surrounded by fish, and signed an “SOS”  agreement, calling for carbon emission cuts.

The president, already a keen diver, told the BBC that “What do we hope to achieve? We hope not to die. I hope I can live in the Maldives and raise my grandchildren here,”

There is a video of the meeting and an article on the BBC’s website.

Scientists from Diversitas, an international programme of biodiversity science, have warned of an alarming increase of animal extinctions as a result of threats to biodiversity and ecosystems. In a blog they seem particularly concerned about freshwater species.

At the 6th Conference of Parties to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity in April 2003,  123 world ministers committed to “achieve, by 2010, a significant reduction of the current rate of biodiversity loss at the local, national and regional levels, as a contribution to poverty alleviation and to the benefit of all life on Earth.”  Georgina Mace of Imperial College, London, and Vice-Chair of the international DIVERSITAS programme says that ““We will certainly miss the target for reducing the rate of biodiversity loss by 2010 and therefore also miss the 2015 environmental targets within the U.N. Millennium Development Goals to improve health and livelihoods for the world’s poorest and most vulnerable people”.

The Diversitas programme is organising its second Open Science Conference in Capetown on Oct. 13-16 with 600 experts from around the world.

You can read more here.