Posted by nicole on 07/17/2006 1:04 pm

The following posting is from Carroll, who is onboard in the Bering Sea...

After a 25-hour transit from St. Paul, we reached St. Matthew Island. We won’t put into port here, because there is no port. No airport. No roads. No town. No people… except, temporarily, for us. Nearly 200 miles in any direction from the nearest human habitation, St. Matthew is by far the most remote place in Alaska and the lower 48. This is no doubt a relief to the Steller sea lions that haul out on Hall Island, a few miles away.

St. Matthew is beautiful. Much bigger and more majestic than I’d expected. As we approached from the south, sheer rock walls rose hundreds of feet straight up from the sea. I half expected to see giant stone skulls in the surf and hear chants of “Kong! Kong! Kong!” floating down from the heights. But as we rounded the point and came in near shore, a new St. Matthew came into view, with rolling green slopes that looked more like Ireland than Skull Island.

Heading up the island, we saw our first whale.  We anchored at Bull Seal Point. We didn’t see any seals, but lots and lots of birds. Kittiwakes, puffins, murres so heavy with fish they could barely get airborne.

The waters around St. Matthew are rich in the herring, capelin and juvenile pollock critical to the diet of these birds, just as it is critical to their neighbors in the Pribilofs. Although the Bering Sea hosts more than 450 species of fish and invertebrates, only a handful of these species account for the majority of the seabird diet. This handful overlaps greatly with the 20 or so species that account for 98% of the fish caught by humans in the Bering.

In the Pribilofs, the ecosystem’s ability to feed fish-eating birds has already been compromised. In the mid-1970s and 1980s, around the time the major declines in Steller sea lions and fur seal began, there were also substantial die-offs of kittiwakes and thick-billed murres, resulting in population declines of up to fifty percent. As with the seals and sea lions, these seabird declines have been linked to a reduction in forage fish like the pollock. Fortunately for the birds of St. Matthew (and unfortunately for birds elsewhere), most of the pollock fishery is still concentrated in the Southeastern Bering, at least for now. Fishing boats come up this way—a fact abundantly demonstrated by the fishing floats we found scattered along the shore—but the great distance from port makes it a little less appealing. Let’s hope it stays that way.

Reducing fishing impact may not be the end of the story, however. Birds that feed at the sea surface are known to be affected by stormy weather, which makes it much tougher for them to feed themselves and their chicks. If, as predicted, global warming leads to an increased number of storms in the Bering, the birds of the Pribilofs—and St. Matthew, and St. Lawrence, and the Aleutians—may face a new and even more serious threat. Continued heavy fishing in the seas where they feed will only compound that threat.

One solution may be to set aside pristine areas, like St. Matthew, or coastal waters around the Pribilofs, where industrial fishing is prohibited or sharply curtailed. Doing that could not only protect forage for seals and seabirds, it could also create a natural laboratory where we could better assess the relative impacts of fishing and climate change. In high school biology experiments, we called it a control. Which is something human activities could use a bit more of these days.

- Carroll

Posted by nicole on 07/17/2006 12:45 pm

The following posting is from Adam, who is onboard in the Bering Sea...

We are now about half a day north of St Paul. It’s a comfortable ride as the swell and breeze are coming from behind us gently helping us along at about 8 knots on our way to St Matthew’s Island. The fog is patchy so every now and then we can see the horizon and people on the bridge pick up binoculars and look around for whales and factory trawlers.

It really feels like we’re on a new stage of the journey as a lot has changed onboard. When you are working with a team doing something as intense as this you really get to know each other and bond, (or the opposite), and we had such a fantastic team on the first half of the voyage that it feels strange now that they are gone and a new bunch have arrived. We will go through the process again though and in a few days everything will feel normal again.

It was sad and a bit scary waving goodbye to Willie and George on the dock. Willie’s the kind of guy that subtly makes you feel safe at sea with his total understanding of, and ability fix, every square inch of the boat. But he gave James and I a very thorough lesson on everything we will have to do for the week he is gone.

We should arrive at St Matthews in about 20 hours or so. It’s an uninhabited (by humans anyway) island and a sanctuary, so we will not be allowed to set foot on it. Luckily there are three or four really good spots to anchor, so whichever way the wind blows we will have a nice lee to be in.

James is cooking what he calls an “experimental dish.”  It’s smelling good though and its still in the pot, which is good because in the last 20 minutes or so the swell’s gotten bigger and changed direction to a bit more on the side so we’re rocking and rolling quite a bit.

Feels like a loooong way from home out here...

- Adam

Note: Adam is a radio operator and RIB driver.  He has worked with Greenpeace in Australia and internationally since 2003.  He is also an industrial rope access  specialist, which involves rigging for skyscrapers and large scale events such as the Olympics, as well as a licensed yacht skipper.

Posted by nicole on 07/17/2006 12:22 pm

The following posting is from Carroll, who is onboard in the Bering Sea...

Today was a day of transitions. We spent today getting a little down time, preparing for departures and arrivals, plotting the next leg of the trip, and watching the fog roll in and roll out at five minute intervals. All my life, I’ve heard the cliche “If you don’t like the weather here, just wait five minutes and it will change,” but the Bering Sea is first place I’ve been where that saying is literally true. It’s sunny. It’s foggy. It’s sunny. It’s rainy. It’s calm. It’s choppy. It’s warm. It’s freezing. The local weather god clearly has a fear of commitment.

We spent the morning charting the course that will take us north to St. Matthew and St. Lawrence Islands, where we’ll begin our humpback research in earnest. We’ll leave tomorrow (weather permitting), spend two days around St. Matthew (unless we only have one), spend the next three days crisscrossing the northern Bering looking for humpbacks (if all goes as planned) and anchor in St. Lawrence on July 21st (um…probably).

Today was also a day for crew changes. Happily, we have two new team members to share the wealth. One of whom is Dave, who will lead our efforts on killer whale and  humpback research and who, we are told, makes killer grilled-cheese sandwiches. So, we got that goin’ for us.

Even with all the comings and goings, we managed to get out to search for killer whales around Otter Island. The frequent fog made spotting difficult, and the calm seas got progressively rougher as we approached Otter Island. At times, the island itself vanished into the fog, so it’s not too surprising that we didn’t see any whales. We didn’t see much of anything. Despite the name, there are no more sea otters on Otter Island. They were driven nearly extinct by commercial hunting in the 18th and 19th centuries. They recovered in much of Alaska during the last century, but never really made a comeback here. The Aleutian populations have been declining again since the 1990s, for reasons that are not yet fully understood.

Nor will you find sea lions, George told us, on Sea Lion Rock. From more than 500,000 animals in 1960, Steller sea lion numbers have fallen to around 20,000 adults today. Overfishing for pollock, a key prey species for the sea lion, is a key suspect.

I’d tell you the story of Walrus Island. But you can already guess the punch line.

All around this remarkable, wild sea, the ecosystem is changing. Seals, sea lions, walruses, even seabirds, are declining at staggering rates. Crab fisheries have crashed in one region after another. Other fisheries have followed the same trend, including, in some areas, the pollock fishery. The causes are complex. Overfishing is one obvious source of problems, but not always the only one. It is beyond doubt now that the climate is getting warmer here, and scientists are increasingly recognizing how that warming affects the wildlife of the Bering—disrupting food webs, causing some species to shift northward, and threatening others, like the walrus and the polar bear, with near-certain extinction. Many fishermen have seized on facts like these to argue that global warming, not overfishing, is the cause of wildlife declines. This tactic, in turn, has made some people who fight overfishing leery of talking about climate impacts. But I don’t think the answer is as simple as one or the other.

The sea lions, the birds and the pollock cannot choose which of these forces to be affected by. They are affected by both of them (and others).  And just as combining two different poisons can result in a new and far more toxic potion, the combination of overfishing and climate change has effects on this and other ecosystems that we’re only beginning to understand, but which appear far more toxic than either force in isolation. The question we have to ask ourselves is not “Which poison is worse?” but “How do we reduce both to make their combination less lethal?”

Stopping global warming demands immediate change, and we should, all of us, work to bring about that change. But even if we reduce greenhouse gas emissions today, it will take decades to work the poison out of our global system. In the meantime, we have to adapt our fishing practices—all of our practices for that matter—to the new realities and great uncertainties of life in a rapidly changing world.

- Carroll