A warning from the deep
Page January 7th, 2008
| Sperm whale in the Azores Islands of the North Atlantic. Photo credit: © Innerspace Visions / Doug Perrine. Click to enlarge. |
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| Click image to view a video of a mother sperm whale with her newborn calf. |
A couple of weeks ago, a friend of mine with the Greenpeace Netherlands action team gave me an absolutely stunning book for Christmas. It’s called Planet Ocean, and it’s a collection of photos taken by Greenpeace photographers on the 16 month “Defending Our Oceans” expedition. Here’s an excerpt from the introduction:
We are born of the oceans; it is where it all began. When the first slimy life forms slithered out of the seas and began the process of evolution on land 400 million years ago, life below the ocean waves was already well established, stretching back around three billion years.
While we might have progressed from the primeval soup, life on Earth still comes from the oceans. They cover three quarters of our planet, are the engines driving our weather systems, a ready-made food store for billions on land and sea and give sanctuary to a staggering 80 percent of life on Earth.
If you live far inland (as I did most of my life), it’s easy to forget that our planet is mostly ocean. It’s easy to forget about amazing creatures like sperm whales, which can dive up to 2000 meters deep hunting for giant squids (more fun facts here).
It turns out that sperm whales are unknowingly sounding a warning to the planet, and Ocean Alliance biologist Roger Payne has translated their message for us:
The first gift the whales gave Roger Payne was their song, which he in turn spread to the ears of the world.
He’s planning to do the same with their final gift to him, the data locked inside the skin and blubber samples he gathered from 986 sperm whales on a 5 1/2-year, round-the-world journey… sitting inside those biopsy samples is the first overall baseline assessment of pollution in the world’s oceans.
“What we’ve analyzed so far,” Payne said, “is shocking. It’s well beyond any degree of pollutants that I thought would exist.”
What may inspire humans to act is not the plight of the whales themselves, but that their plight could be a harbinger of our own demise:
“If we don’t do something about ocean pollution,” Payne said from the study of his hillside home in South Woodstock, Vt., “I think there’s a very good chance that humanity will lose access to fish from the sea. And because seafood is the principal source of protein for over a billion people, you could easily argue that this is the largest public health crisis in the world.”
Although the article’s detailed description of Payne’s long career as a conservationist implies that his research is non-lethal, I wish it had mentioned that explicitly. Here’s what the Ocean Alliance’s Whale Conservation Institute says:
The team of scientists working with WCI during the Voyage of the Odyssey is committed to the use of non-lethal and wherever possible non-invasive techniques to collect data. For our toxicology and genetics work two types of samples will be collected from the whales: free-floating skin fragments naturally shed by the animals and small biopsies of skin and blubber. Biopsy collection requires only minimally invasive technique and currently is the only way to collect data necessary for studying the levels and potential effects of pollution on whales.
Greenpeace gives some details about non-lethal whale research here, including a description of how biopsies are obtained. The point is that whales don’t have to be killed for research, a false claim made by the Japanese Fisheries Agency (but that’s another topic for another post).
Sperm whales, like other creatures near the top of the food chain (e.g. polar bears and orcas), bioconcentrate certain pollutants. These pollutants are called “persistent organic pollutants”, or POPs.
From the UN website:
Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs) are chemical substances that persist in the environment, bioaccumulate through the food web, and pose a risk of causing adverse effects to human health and the environment. With the evidence of long-range transport of these substances to regions where they have never been used or produced and the consequent threats they pose to the environment of the whole globe, the international community has now, at several occasions called for urgent global actions to reduce and eliminate releases of these chemicals.
But that’s enough chemistry geek stuff for now. You’ll recognize some of these pollutants on this list, like DDT, dioxins, and PCBs. Now, hopefully, you’ll realize they aren’t just strange acronyms and words, that they’re still out there in the environment, and they’re affecting wildlife… and ultimately, us.
What can you do? Two good websites that can give you a few ideas are the World Wildlife Federation Chemicals Campaign site, and, of course, Greenpeace’s Toxics Campaign site.