Dosidicus gigas

To meet a [Humboldt] squid in the wild is one of life's great pleasures. They follow your movements with intelligent, saucer eyes. Their emotions are written on their skin in quick-fire colour changes that pulse and ripple in incandescent waves across their bodies. The Humboldt's uncertain temper adds a little frisson to any encounter. Divers have been roughed up by squid or had their masks or gear tugged. After the adrenalin rush has passed, most divers feel the animals were more curious than aggressive. If they had really wanted to hurt them, with their huge strength they could have done far worse.

-- Callum Roberts in Ocean of Life: How Our Seas Are Changing. [1]

Roberts notes that the Humboldt squid seems to have benefited from expansion of its low oxygen habitat and from the loss of big predatory sharks to overfishing. [2] According to Ron O'Dor, its range has expanded from South America all the way to Alaska as some 90% of large fish have been eliminated by Man. [3] So the species looks like a real beneficiary of the Anthropocene.

On the other hand Rui Rosa predicts the animal's metabolism will drop in future because there will be more carbon dioxide in the water."The squid will be more lethargic and so more vulnerable to their predators because they won't be able to escape them any more." [4] 

Could we, then, be witnessing a spectacular boom to be followed shortly by a spectacular bust in Humboldt squid numbers as a result of human impacts?  Is there a name for species such as this that ride the Anthropocene up and (perhaps) then crash? 

Notes

1. Reviewed in The Economist and the Financial Times. My interview with Roberts will be published in Mandarin and English by Chinadialogue
2. Invasive range expansion by the Humboldt squid
3. The incredible flying squid
4. Synergistic effects of climate-related variables suggest future physiological impairment in a top oceanic predator

Eaten

The consumption of animals such as whales, dolphins and manatees is on the rise in poor nations. Declines in coastal fish catches have led people to look for other sources of meat...

Cetaceans are making their way to dinner plates as other protein sources are dwindling in coastal areas of west Africa, Peru, Brazil, Colombia, Trinidad and Tobago, Madagascar, Sri Lanka, India, the Philippines and Burma. From 1970 to 2009, at least 92 species of cetaceans were eaten by humans.

- report, paper.

'the infinite succession of soft and radiant forms'

If anyone goes down to those shores now, if man or boy seeks to follow in our traces, let him realize at once, before he takes the trouble to roll up his sleeves, that his zeal will end in labour lost. There is nothing, now, where in our days there was so much. Then the rocks between tide and tide were submarine gardens of a beauty that seemed often to be fabulous, and was positively delusive, since, if we delicately lifted the weed curtains of a windless pool, though we might for a moment see its sides and floor paven with living blossoms, ivory-white, rosy-red, grange and amethyst, yet all that panoply would melt away, furled into the hollow rock, if we so much as dropped a pebble in to disturb the magic dream.

-- so wrote Edmund Gosse, recalling his boyhood seashore explorations on the Devon coast with his father in the 1850s.

News from Scotland, including (supposedly) the first sighting in British waters of the ancient amphioxus, or lancelet, indicates that at least a few inshore locations in the north of this island have survived the ravages of more than a century of intense fishing and other depredations. Could this be a token of more to come, and of a measure of recovery?

Future fish

The construct also contains a stretch of DNA from the promoter region of an ocean pout, an eel-like creature that lives in extremely cold environments (the promoter is a switch that controls the expression of a downstream gene). Normally, the eel uses this promoter to keep an antifreeze gene turned on constantly so it does not freeze. The promoter is therefore “constitutive,” meaning it is always active, and coupling it with a growth factor gene in an Atlantic salmon results in the salmon experiencing a continual growth spurt—since the growth factor is continually produced. Studies have shown that the genetically-altered Atlantic salmon’s appetite would make it constantly ravenous, meaning that it would eat everything around in sight.

-- FDA Decision Will Lead To First Ever Genetically-Modified Animal For Consumption

A hundred to one

If we were to expand marine protection from less than 1% to 30%, say, what would that cost? Establishing reserves, policing them and so on, would cost about $40-50bn per year - and the annual benefit would be about $4-5 trillion.

-- says Pavan Sukdev, study leader of TEEB. The study also finds the ongoing loss of forest comes with an annual pricetag of US $2-5 trillion.

Bye bye bluefin

Catches [of bluefin tuna] in 2008 were at three times the ICCAT limit, which is itself more than what its scientific advisers consider sustainable. "It's like the year before the collapse of the northern cod," says Dan Pauly.

More widely, a 2009 assessment of the state of commercial fisheries around the world found that 80 percent of fish stocks are either fully exploited, overexploited, or have collapsed (via Center for Biological Diversity).

A river runs with it

When government scientists went looking for mercury contamination in fish in 291 streams around the United States...Emissions from coal-fired power plants are the largest source of mercury contamination in the U.S.

-- NYT

Doch das Messer sieht man nicht

Discovery’s Shark Week Web site asks, “What kind of shark are you?” Many biologists would ask, “What kind of species are we?”

-- Andy Revkin

Beyond doom and gloom

Yes, there are certainly extensively overfished stocks and the oceans are in trouble, but there are some examples of decent management and reason for hope...Doom and gloom doesn't get us anywhere.

-- Peter Kareiva of the Nature Conservancy, quoted in an report on Rebuilding Global Fisheries by Boris Worm, Ray Hilborn at al (see also report here).

Yuck or yum

From Jennifer Jacquet and David Beck at Guilty Planet:

Shame

Alain de Botton has been reported as saying "Ferrari drivers are incredibly vulnerable and need our love and sympathy".

Brandon Keim is less indulgent when it comes to the conspicuous consumption of Bluefin tuna:

this is the brutal truth: bluefin, which beyond their intrinsic value as living creatures happen to be one of the universe's more majestic species, a Platonic ideal of oceanic speed and grace, aren't being extinguished by our greed. They're being sacrificed to our vanity, pretension, and ostentation — the most pathetic of our vices.

Hat tip Pharyngula: Destroying beauty because you can afford it.

ID in the bone

Ever inclined to make an inscription, human beings have figured out how to write their own messages in the heart of the [otolith]. By sequentially altering the temperature of the water in which salmon fry are hatched and raised, researchers can lay a distinctive “batch label” into the chemical layers of the otolith—a kind of barcode, inscribed in stone, and indelibly preserved within the maturing adult fish (a puckish early student of this technique used it to write “hi mom” in binary inside his experimental animal). Later, when these free-swimming creatures are captured at sea, each can be traced unfailingly to its hatchery of origin. Some five billion Pacific salmon have now been marked in this way, their inner qibla reconfigured to refer to their point of origin, and thus the point to which they seek return.

from The Orienting Stone

Homo in fabula

The universe is made up of stories, not of atoms.

So said Muriel Rukeyser. And for humans, at least, it seems to be true. [1]

Brian Boyd sees it like this:

In other species we can recognize the first impulses of art but no more. Other animals can engage in exploratory behavior that seems designed to appeal to the mind, but only in isolated and incidental fashion. [2] But in our own species the impulse to art develops reliably in all normal individuals. The isolated sparks in other species have become the steady current of human art.

Narrative and story are not, of course the sum total of human art. They are, however, almost always implicit in virtually every aspect of it. So what about some of the 'big' stories for the future? End of the Line, a new film on the crisis fisheries [3], offers two typical possibilities. The first, put crudely, is disaster. A north African diver says (humorously and as provocation, but also seriously):

Man is not going to change, and the sea is going to be dead. Because Man is crazy.

The second, crudely, is hope. Callum Roberts, a marine scientist, warns that "our ability to arm and exploit far outweighs our ability to control ourselves," but offers a compelling account of how people working together and "resolute in protection" can reduce the likelihood of disaster.


Footnotes

[1] Simon Critchley tries an heroic summary of Heidegger:

The basic and very simple idea, as we will see in future entries, is that the human being is first and foremost not an isolated subject, cut off from a realm of objects that it wishes to know about. We are rather beings who are always already in the world, outside and alongside a world from which, for the most part, we do not distinguish ourselves.

Todd May writes:

What characterizes a human life are engagements... Consciousness is more than merely being aware. It is also being involved.

[2] Dolphins, for example, create elaborate bubble 'art', and chimpanzees sometimes engage in imaginative imitation and representation.

[3] See Organised crime. And see Big fish for a reference to the excellent book The Unnatural History of the Sea by Callum Roberts.

Organised crime

One of the striking allegations in End of the Line is that Mitsubishi is promoting the fishing of bluefin tuna to near extinction in order to profit from the large frozen stockpile of the animal that it has amassed. When bluefin have been wiped out, it is said, the price of those stocks will go through the roof. The corporation will then move on to allied species.

P.S. 11 June: Jennifer Jacquet looks forward to raising the profile of a Stop Eating Seafood movement.

Truth will trout

...no matter how much pain creatures we view as "food" are scientifically proven to experience, 94% of us will go on fuelling demand for them, sticking our fingers in our ears and yelling, "la la la, they taste nice, so shut up and let me eat them!"

-- Ariane Sherine.

Our common future

For North Sea cod - the touchstone stock for UK consumers - 93% of fish are caught before they can reproduce. Yes, you read that correctly - 93%.

-- Richard Black

Bradán feasa

Salmon can distinguish a single drop from their own river among 8 million litres of seawater.

-- Nature's Great Events: The Great Salmon Run. Some Pacific salmon swim as much as 2,000 miles up river. They move against strong currents with little effort, much as a yacht tacks into the wind.

From the deepest river

Elephant fish from the Congo.

Memo

The eldest of the fishermen, Memo, rubs his grizzled chin in somber recollection, for one of our students has just asked a pointed and painful question: Which species have disappeared in his lifetime?

Solemnly, as though he’s reciting the names of his own deceased ancestors, Memo begins: the sea cucumbers, the fan clam, the lion’s paw scallop . . . . He’s working his way back in time, I think, moving from the most recently vanished toward the creatures that disappeared when he was a child.

In the early ’90s, he reaches the sharks; in the ’70s, the sea turtles; in the ’60s, the giant sea bass; and in the years of his childhood, the great totoaba, a six-foot croaker that was once pulled from these waters by the million.[1]

-- Aaron E Hirsh, who argues that a system of “individual transferable quota”, or “fish shares”, is can offer a path to more sustainable fisheries in many places.


[1] See also Saenz-Arroyo, A, et al. 2005. Rapidly shifting environmental baselines among fishers of the Gulf of California. Proceedings of the Royal Society B. DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2005.3175.

'Eating tourism' boom

Spawning of reef fish in [the Coral Trangle] has declined 79 percent over the past 5 to 20 years, depending on location.

-- NYT reports work by Yvonne Sadovy et al.

Our ultimate success in preserving and restoring the oceans depends on a more inclusive ethic for the seas.

-- from Developing an Ocean Ethic by Peter J Auster et al

('Big fish', we have been reminded, 'save reefs')