why few fish in the sea

amenity · why few fish in the sea

Taken from Lloyds List today;

'Spy in the sky' nabs five ships red-handed

ByJustin Stares in Brussels - Thursday 26 April 2007
A TEN-DAY sweep of the Channel and North Sea caught five ships in the act of polluting, Belgian authorities reported today.

Six countries contributed seven aircraft to one of Europe’s longest continuous joint anti-pollution exercises, which was announced until it had finished just before midday.

Three of the unnamed vessels were detained in British waters, one in Dutch and one in Belgian waters after planes using infra-red and ultraviolet sensors honed in on the slicks they had left behind.

The planes, plus a standby fleet of seven ships used to collect samples, were using ‘spy in the sky’ satellite technology similar to the system now being rolled out across the EU under the CleanSeaNet brand. The satellites can feed data on suspected polluters to coastguard services within minutes.

The participants in the exercise, code-named Super Cepco (coordinated extended pollution control operation), were all signatories of the anti-pollution Bonn convention. It ran for almost ten times as long as previous exercises, and spotted a total of 45 slicks.

Belgium, the Netherlands, Britain, France, Denmark and Germany all provided aircraft, while Sweden and Norway participated without planes. The European Commission contributed financially.

“Belgium, the other North Sea countries and the European Commission wanted to give a signal to the maritime world with this Super CEPCO operation: that oil pollution in European waters is not tolerated and has to be stopped. These large surveillance operations will take place again in the future, on top of the regular surveillance,” said North Sea minister Renaat Landuyt. “The Belgian government wants to underline its zero tolerance for pollution in the North Sea.”

The EU would draw up guidelines for surveying polluters, he said.

While five ships were caught, the other 40 who had deliberately discharged into the sea got away, organisers admitted. “Just because you have policemen on the street, it does not mean there will be no crime,” said a spokeswoman.

The Belgian press regularly runs photos of beaches polluted as the result of deliberate discharges from passing ships.

Lin

Just a shame they did not catch the other 40 ,hope they fine the a*** off the ones they did catch though ,dirty ,filthy fools and still they tell us our sea is clean enough to swim in .....don't think so somehow.

amenity

It was a toss up whether to put this here or under dredging our beaches, this won 'cos of it's implications for the survival of the fishing stocks.

From the Marinet website.

In July 2006 the UK government issued a new 5 year aggregate dredging licence for Area 202, which is known as Cross Sands and is located off Great Yarmouth. Area 202 is linked to an adjacent aggregate derdging site at Cross Sands, Area 436.

The licence to extract marine aggregate (sand and gravel) from Area 436 expired in June 2006 and the aggregate company, Hanson Aggregate Marine Ltd, applied to continue aggregate dredging in this locality via a licence extension for the adjacent site, Area 202.

MARINET has objected to this new licence extension for Area 202 because in the Environmental Statement (ES) for the new Area 202 licence it was shown that of the total amount of sediment (sand and gravel) which had been removed from the seabed in Area 436 (the adjacent site) during the previous 5 years only 20% of this loss of seabed could be accounted for by the actual removal of dredged material and, in some places, the seabed had disappeared to a depth of 5 metres. The remaining 80% loss, the ES claimed, had disappeared due to natural processes.

This high incidental loss of seabed concerns MARINET. Firstly, the actual natural processes accounting for the large loss of seabed are not clearly explained in the ES, and MARINET fears that these "natural processes" may have been induced or accelerated by the dredging activity itself. Secondly, if natural processes are working in this manner in Area 436, what are the implications for the new licence in Area 202 (the adjacent site) and the extensive wider block of aggregate dredging licences off Great Yarmouth?

MARINET asked the UK government to investigate both of these matters before deciding whether to issue a new licence for Area 202. The UK government declined to do so.

Also, MARINET has been concerned about the uncertain physical and biological condition of Area 436 upon the expiry of its licence. Government procedures which determine the issuing of licences (Marine Minerals Guidance Note 1) require the licence holder to demonstrate that at least 50 cms of natural substrate (sand and gravel) remain on the seabed when the licence expires so that there is a suitable physical habitat for marine life to use in recolonisation of the area, and the licence holder is meant to undertake a programme of monitoring to see whether this recolonisation occurs.

In the case of Area 436 the UK government has neither required the licence holder (Hanson Aggregate Marine Ltd) to demonstrate that 50 cms of substrate remains following the expiry of the licence, nor to undertake any programme of monitoring to establish whether recolonisation by the natural benthic community (marine life) occurs. MARINET has informed the UK government and the relevant Secretary of State that this, in MARINET's opinion, is a failure of duty.

For further details of these matters, see Area 202/436 on our Marine Aggregate Dredging page.

daveb

Lets face it the Governments only interest in dredging is the license revenue it generates. It tends to take its environmental advice from Consultants paid for by the same industry, so the chances of any real restriction is pretty well nil.

amenity

davebe is spot on.

This is from Lloyds List today and follows from my post of the April 27th.

I think we the public should be informed or little will change.

"Get the message

ANOTHER rash of fierce prosecutions by the US authorities over “magic pipes” and oil pollution allegations has broken out.

Despite the enormous fines and savage sentences doled out to the wretched ship staff who have been found guilty of Marpol-related crimes, still pollution offences come to light. And in European waters overflights by pollution spotters have showed up a large number of oil slicks and caught vessels in the act of polluting.

What has to be done to get the message about the complete unacceptability of this behaviour across? It is said that it is still easier to pollute than to behave responsibly, and human nature will inevitably opt for the easy option.

Some suggest that it is a cultural problem, with too many people believing that they are doing something sensible when they bypass a poorly performing separator or arrive in port with minimum pollutants to discharge.

This sort of attitude needs to be tackled, but from the very top down in every company. At the same time it is too difficult, and often impossible, to discharge slops in too many ports. This needs to be confronted, and at the highest levels of port management."

Lloyd’s List

69-77 Paul Street, London EC2A 4LQ

amenity

Sorry this is so long but it's worth it. Lloyds List today

Stranger than fiction: the critters that offer a challenge to science

Viewpoint Michael Grey - Monday 14 May 2007

THERE is a whole genre of fictitious writing devoted to global calamity and I have always been an enthusiast, although I really do try to prevent this enthusiasm spreading into my day job.

Fifty years on and it is still difficult to better John Wyndham with his triffids and krakens and alien children, and the picture of frightful circumstances grafted on to a familiar contemporary England.

Another who was a past master at chilling the blood was John Christopher, who wrote about gigantic earthquakes drying up the seas and the grim lives of the survivors after such an apocalypse.

I thought briefly of them both as our radio stuttered into life a couple of weeks ago to inform us of the great earthquake of Folkestone, which mysteriously missed the Channel Tunnel.

Christopher was interested in botany, too, and weaved a particularly gruesome tale about what would happen to the earth after all the grasses withered and died.

It is a long time since I read this book but I seem to recall that Death of Grass began with a failure of a grain crop in the old Soviet Union, itself not that remarkable but which assumed catastrophic proportions once this disease spread across the world.

It was a man-made calamity but nothing, I hasten to add, to do with genetic manipulation which, like environmentalists, had still to be invented.

But truth is sometimes stranger than fiction.

Who, for instance, in the 1960s or 1970s, when this fiction was hugely in vogue, would have looked at a ship’s ballast tank and considered that it was a vehicle for transmitting alien species around the world?

Creatures and pathogens, moreover, which would cost billions to control before we ever got around to producing effective counter-measures.

I can still recall the late 1960s when articles were being written, more in curiosity than in panic, about the strange phenomenon of a species of Japanese seaweed, which had been identified by marine biologists plodding around the Solent shores in their wellies.

The theory was, if I recall, that the spores of the seaweed, which conveniently grew near several thousand sushi restaurants around the Sea of Japan where they delightedly ate the stuff, had adhered to the bottoms of the new class of containerships, which were something of a novelty at the time.

And it was spreading like wildfire.

The obvious question as to why conventional ships, or even tea clippers for that matter, had not imported the same seaweed from the Orient was easily answered.

First, there was the speed of the containerships, which were far faster than the fastest Blue Flue, which would have probably stopped in more wayports where the bottom of the ship would have been licked clean by barnacles and little fishes.

Even more convincing was the fact that the Far East general cargo liners in the pre-container days would arrive in the great enclosed dock systems of London and the Mersey where the water was so foul that it would kill any living thing in seconds.

Heavens, sailors who regretted having signed on a ship due to sail from London not infrequently fell into the dock, knowing that the consequence of this “accident” — assuming they were fished out before their clothes were eaten away, or worse — was a three-day stay in the Dreadnought hospital in Greenwich, being studied assiduously by experts in diseases and ogling the nurses.

Japanese seaweed would not stand a chance amid this turgid, toxic soup.

The Japanese seaweed story reached my antennae by way of a story in the Southampton Daily Echo — little more than a “nib” in that it is really just a tiny page filler which failed to impress the news desk team but was, hugely attenuated, slung in to record the fact of its existence.

Just imagine, however, if we knew then what we know now, about the zebra mussels which must have been on passage at that very time to their new and nutritious home in Great Lakes.

They were the spearhead of an invasion in the ballast tanks of ships, spreading all over the world — all the dinoflaggelates, the striped wrasses, the Chinese mitten crabs, the extremely nasty diseases all hitching a lift in the bulkers and tankers and car carriers which were bringing industrial shipping to the world.

If we only knew what we know now, it would not be a “news in brief” in the Echo. It would be eight pages in the Daily Mail, while the New York Times would be producing double-page spreads on the environmental menace facing the world, demanding instant action and mobilisation of all possible resources to combat the terror.

Water ballast would become the new menace to freedom and democracy and it would be banned in a trice, to be replaced with sand and coal slag and bricks just like the old days.

Shipowners the world over could curse and swear, weep and collectively protest, but it would avail them little.

They would have to get their heads down and come up with something rather more environmentally friendly to keep their ships upright and their propellers buried.

The novelists of doom would have to seek a new career in non-fiction, which would be far more gripping than anything they could have constructed in their fertile imaginations. But if we did wake up much earlier to the problems being exported around the world in the ballast tanks of ships, would anything really have been very different?

By the late 1960s marine biologists in the Great Lakes were sufficiently alarmed about alien growths blocking up cooling water inlets, to have alerted the US and Canadian governments.

By the 1970s there was a good deal of evidence which associated the transfer of alien species categorically to the ballast tanks.

But every year we became more dependent on industrial shipping, the tankers and bulkers ever bigger and the quantities of ballast transported around the world became ever greater.

As the problem grew exponentially, any solutions became ever more problematic.

This was no little local difficulty but a real crisis of global proportions, which required more innovation and colossal expenditure to roll back.

Well, we have come a long way since those times, but every year there is more evidence that the aliens have been exported to new places where they had never been hitherto reported.

The excellent publications of IMO’s GloBallast Organisation year in, year out, report fresh contaminations.

Ever so slowly, there has been progress with the ballast convention, and patient research undertaken on various means of terminating the alien life on passage.

But there is still a vast majority of shipping which will exchange ballast at sea, which is mostly effective but ludicrously inefficient and sometimes downright dangerous.

If you are gazing out of your wheelhouse windows in a North Atlantic gale and see what appears to be a small cloud approaching on a collision course, it is best to do something about it.

For it will be an empty bulker motoring along in a vast cloud of spray as they try and exchange their ballast before they reach the US economic exclusion zone.

They cannot see you, and you cannot see them through the spray cloud. We still do not yet know how a full car carrier fell on its side in the Pacific last year, but most people are putting money on some sort of ballast problem.

You feel that gradually, but ever so slowly, some better ideas are emerging.

The IMO itself, which has a review group looking at progress as the January, 2009, implementation date of the ballast water conventions creeps closer, cautiously suggests that by that time it is possible that there will be viable technology to treat ballast water.

There is some good work being done with flue gases, heat, ultra-violet, even benign chemicals. There is a splendid Japanese project underway to design a big bulkerwhich will not need ballast at all,another design for a ship that willsuck in clean ballast at the bow and discharge it at the stern, swilling out the tanks like your bath, without running all the pumps 24 hours a day for weeks on end and melting the impellers.

Gradually, you have to acknowledge, we are getting there.

But you have to feel in retrospect that, if we really were worried about the menace which began all those years ago we might have moved a little faster.

The fact is there was a lot of inertia building up against any dramatic changes which could menace the operation of ships, almost regardless of the long-term consequences to the environment.

It is tempting to look at other supposedly clear and present global threats with much the same sort of attitudes being exhibited.

Climate change? The search for sustainability? I am as guilty as the next man, never quite sure what I should believe, but always tending to the line of least resistance.

Just last week I espied, in London’s Evening Standard, on my way home, another “nib” on an inside page, sandwiched between items about celebrities and complaints about the horrors of London Transport.

“United States beekepeers,” it succinctly noted, “have lost a quarter of nests to colony collapse disorder”.

It is something serious because it menaces world food supplies, so it was well worth the two inches of print.

I read somewhere else that German scientists had proved that the emissions from mobile phone masts had completely distorted the bees’ direction finding facilities.

The choice, as I see it, is the complete destruction of the world’s food crops and probably mankind, or the banning of mobile phones.

No prizes for guessing the probable choice. As the hymn reminds us, “The darkness deepens, Lord with me abide...”

amenity

Took this from an article in the Independant today, supporting what fishermen have been saying for years poisons rob the people of fish.

The most striking effect of the dry weather has been to expose large parts of the bed of Lake Okeechobee, the vast circular expanse of water east of Palm Beach, Florida, which acts as a back-up water supply for five million Floridians. Archaeologists have had a field day - dredging the soil for human bone fragments, tools, bits of pottery and ceremonial jewellery thought to have belonged to the natives who lived near the lake before the Spanish arrived in the 16th century.

Environmentalists are not entirely upset, because the lake is notoriously polluted with pesticides and other farm products that then poison nearby rivers. River fish stocks in the area are now booming.

Nothing, though, was so strange as the fires that broke out over about 12,000 acres on the northern edge of the lake at the end of May. They were eventually doused by Tropical Storm Barry last weekend. State water managers, however, say it will may take a whole summer of rainstorms, or longer, to restore the lake.

amenity

This is totally unbelievable Rolling Eyes

Earth's "Eighth Continent" in the Pacific Ocean

A recent news report records how a huge area of the Pacific ocean is being filled with plastic rubbish. The ocean's currents create an area of sea in mid-ocean with a gyre which in turn creates a vortex and causes floating material to be trapped at that spot. Thus flotsam, largely vast quantities of discarded plastic, is forming an artificial island, see http://thetyee.ca/News/2007/11/21/PacificGarbagePatch/
If you want to play your part in clearing up plastic rubbish from our seas and beaches (thus preventing plastic killing marine life), then contact Surfers Against Sewage