Ocean Blog

Here at Oceana HQ, everyone has been buzzing about the new Batman flick. The consensus is that the movie is genius. Well, I hate to be the one to burst everyone's bubble, but it looks like Batman was no hero - to sharks, that is. Forget Jaws: the Caped Crusader was the original pop culture anti-shark rumormonger.

Callum Roberts, author of the excellent tome "The Unnatural History of the Sea," has tackled the nexus of ecology and economy in his blog on the Island Press website. Rising fuel costs, it seems, may be a blessing for stressed fish stocks now that many fishing ships can no longer afford to travel long distances for their catch.

I was inspired to write about this issue after reading an essay in Harper's about the fallibility of Gross Domestic Product. But Roberts introduces some concrete facts to put this all in perspective.

"If cod, haddock or flounder find their way onto your plate, the fuel cost of catching them was a third to a half of the weight of your fillet," he writes. "If line caught swordfish or tuna are your favourites, the fuel burnt to catch them was roughly equal to the weight of your fish portion."

Yikes. Fishermen are already protesting high fuel costs, and demand additional government subsidies to cover the difference.

Here at Oceana, we already know fuel subsidies are a bad idea. The fishing industry has depended on $20 billion in government handouts long before fuel costs skyrocketed. Thankfully our Cut the Bait team is already on the case, working hard at the World Trade Organization to ensure that subsidies don't increase - and that fish populations around the world get a much-needed rest.

Oh, sharks. When will you stop being terrifying?

Late last week, police charged a man with disorderly conduct for saying he spotted two great whites off the beach of Martha's Vineyard - the selfsame spot where movie-monster Jaws hunted humans in 1974.

Too bad the man's sighting was fabricated, and cleared the beaches for no reason. While the Jaws mythos is still going strong, your chance of being killed by a shark is one in 264 million.

This time of year, people flock to the beach - and whisper rumors of shark attacks. As a good Oceana reader knows, shark attacks are incredibly rare, and sharks have much more to fear from humans than vice versa. I've written a column about sharks and beaches for Away.com that you can read here. Don't miss my first column for Away.com on nesting sea turtles.

Today, Sprig.com features video from a recent Oceana event in New York. Check out what Ted Danson, Rosario Dawson and others have to say about saving the oceans.

Well, at least Stephen Colbert's take on the Arctic situation is pretty funny. A confluence of melting sea ice and increased demand for Arctic resources may spell disaster for the world's last great wilderness - ah, forget it. The video's much more entertaining than any description I can come up with, so click and enjoy.

The Standard-Times, a newspaper covering southern Massachusetts, features a blog about fishing issues. It's an appropriate topic for an area that has been part of America's oldest fishing communities. Waterscape polls its readers on fishing-related issues; currently, it wants to know whether you favor closing scallop fishing grounds to protect sea turtles. I think we know the answer to that one, right? Head on over and make your voice heard.

The crew of the Oceana Ranger had to take an impromptu break late last week when a wild bottlenose dolphin named Gaspar befriended Ranger's ROV.

Gaspar lives among the fjords, or "rias," of Galicia, on Spain's northern coast, and he is something of a local celebrity among the people there. His newfound friendship with the ROV has interrupted the crew's work, but according to what we've heard, everyone is enjoying the distraction.

To view more photo's from the Ranger 2008 expedition, please click here. To donate on behalf of the Ranger 2008 expedition, please click here.

NBC Nightly News interviewed Oceana's Santi Roberts in a segment on overfishing. The piece also includes Oceana footage of a bottom trawler in action, mowing over an innocent octopus. Check it out.

In the May issue of Harper's, Jonathan Rowe argues that the Gross Domestic Product is a poor measure of an economy's health because it only tallies spending, and doesn't take into account whether the spending actually adds anything to our quality of life. According to the GDP, he writes, "a terminal-cancer patient going through a costly divorce" is "the nation's economic hero." Likewise, the GDP measures increased fossil fuel use as a positive, since it burns dollars; in actuality, the nation is poorer because its irreplaceable natural resources are diminished.

Where am I going with this? I think I've come across a real-world example of Rowe's thesis: according to an industry group, high fuel costs could take up to one-third of the world's longline tuna fleet off the oceans. This is great for the yellowfin and bigeye tuna usually targeted by these boats, but of course the industry group and the article posit that this "bad" for the economy.

Our natural resources aren't considered in the GDP, and so most talk of "stimulating" the economy doesn't paint a full picture of what's really going on. As we burn fuel, cut down trees, scoop out tuna and lop off mountaintops, we irrevocably give up parts of the planet, parts of ourselves even, for the sake of positive statistics.

As Rowe concludes, "The purpose of an economy is to meet human needs in such a way that life becomes in some respect richer and better in the process." Leaving some tuna fish in the sea, I think, moves us closer to this ideal.