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22 March 10 As time goes on I find myself getting more and more involved in the work I do. I find my various jobs both incredibly interesting and incredibly rewarding. And, as I suspect is the case so often, the more I learn about what's going on around me the more involved I become. In Marine Mammal Center news, I was recently appointed to the Board of Directors! I sit on the Board as the representative from the Volunteer Council, which I was elected to last year. This is my introduction to this sort of thing but, unlike corporate boards, the MMC Board is all about the animals and conservation and *not* all about profits. So yay, we'll see where this goes. Also at TMMC we are in the thick of elephant seal pup season. Two weeks ago we had 18 ellies, last Tuesday we had 34, and today there are 50! This means 11-12 hour days (at least it's just once a week), and what seems like millions of tube feedings. I've just got my fingers crossed that our numbers don't go much higher than this! (If you're interested in working with seals come volunteer with us!) At the California Academy of Sciences the work is less urgent, but no less interesting. Down in the Orthinology & Mammalogy Bone Lab I've been working on some interesting animals: bobcat, red fox, opossum, and harbor porpoise. Over in the Steinhart Aquarium, I recently began doing the Coral Reef diving presentations! Twice every day there is a presentation in the Philippines Coral Reef tank with a presenter standing outside the tank interfacing with the audience, and a diver in a full-face intercom mask inside the tank. Together they talk about the tank and the coral reef environment, and answer questions from the audience. Last week was my third time as the diver-presenter which is both fun as well as a little nerve-wracking because I hope I am only asked questions to which I know the answers! 14 March 10 I have evolved an interesting relationship with death. Too often, the patients I work with at The Marine Mammal Center die or are euthanized. You learn to keep some mental distance and not become attached to your patients, lest their deaths take an even greater toll on you; this must be how veterinarians, doctors, and nurses feel. Over at The California Academy of Sciences, my work is done with dead creatures. Carcasses are donated by the Marine Mammal Center or various state and national parks, or picked up off the beaches by Academy volunteers. There is some sadness working with dead animals, but it is somewhat tempered by the fact that the animals did not die to become part of the Academy's collection, but rather, because they died their deaths can then become meaningful and their bodies are used to increase scientific knowledge. Nevertheless, that sense of mental distance still prevails. Working with a dead creature is the most intimate sort of work I've ever done. I see the insides of their bodies, parts the owners themselves never see. I discover things about these animals that no one else would ever know. I know the bobcat I recently worked on ate a bird shortly before he was surprised and killed by a coyote, and that is something no one else could have known. 12 March 10 Ha ha ha! I was just looking back through some old journal entries and came across this, from 15 February 2005: I could change the focus of my studies and go for a B.S. in Zoology, and then work at the Zoo, the Steinhart Aquarium, or even the Marine Mammal Center.Well, I did change my goal to a BS in Zoology, although I still have not yet attained that. What I have done, however, is worked two different volunteer stints at the Zoo, I am currently diving in the Steinhart, and I'm one of the key volunteers at the Marine Mammal Center! Yay for living my dreams! 24 January 10 Anyone who knows me knows I love sharks. A lot. I will dive with sharks whenever possible, but unfortunately that is not as often as you might expect; there aren't many sharks left in the oceans (they are being killed at the rate of about 100,000,000 per year!) and the ones that are left are quite shy and scared of people. So it usually takes quite a bit of effort on the part of a diver to swim with sharks. The Trip Earlier this month Frederick and I spent eight days on Jim Abernethy's Shear Water boat in the waters of the Bahamas. Jim has been diving these waters for years, and knows where to find sharks. Lots and lots of sharks. How could I turn down a trip like this? Most shark dives consist of the dive crew taking some bait down to the seafloor, and divers sit in a line and watch the sharks being fed, then you come back to the boat once the food is gone. They are actually a bit boring, and the only reason I've done them at all is because it is one of the few ways one can see sharks in the wild. Jim's trips are an exception to the rule, and because of this, they are not for the inexperienced. The five days we dived at Tiger Beach we had bait (bits of fish leftover from either a restaurant or other processing place) in milk crates hanging off the back of the boat. We were free to dive as much as we wanted, and since most sites were only about 20 feet deep, this meant doing multiple dives of an hour or two each (in fact I would only come up because I was cold; I never came close to running low on air). Sharks were attracted to the area because of the scent of fish in the water and probably wouldn't have been seen otherwise.   The Sharks I saw multiple sharks the entire time I was in the water. Most were lemon sharks, with between six and thirty-five-plus animals at any one time. One day we also had a few Caribbean reef sharks. But the real reason we were there was to see tiger sharks, and they were there every day but the first. I saw at least five different tiger sharks, and as many as three at once. One shark in particular, "Emma," visited us almost every day. Emma is a 10-11' female tiger shark, and she is well-known to the boat crew. She is very tolerant of people, and will often come close to each diver in turn, as if to see who you are. I never saw her make anything close to an aggressive move; rather, her movements were slow and gentle. (We spent the last two days of our trip in another area searching for great hammerheads. Unfortunately the weather was uncooperative, and we never did find them, instead just spending the time aboard the boat. Unpredictability is the norm with wildlife viewing.)   The Feeling How do I describe the feeling of being in the water with dozens of sharks at once? For me, it was incredible, exhilarating, full of beauty, and a dream come true. Here I was, standing on the bottom surrounded by these fabulous creatures, reaching out and petting them as they swam by. There was no sense of danger or adrenaline, but simply a mutual respect between all species present. What made the biggest impression on me was seeing these large tiger sharks, sometimes twice as long as I am tall, swimming by and I could watch their eyes swivel in their sockets to look at me. They are regarding me as an individual. These are creatures that could easily bite me in half if they wanted to, but they don't want to; they just want to be left alone to go about their lives. To me, the most important part of this trip was showing how sharks are not "single-minded killers," or "indiscriminate eaters," or even necessarily dangerous. I (and a dozen other divers) spent hours in the water with them and saw zero signs of aggression or violence. It is sad that millions of sharks have been wantonly slaughtered over the years simply because people misunderstand them. The Guests I consider our trip to be legendary, not because of the animals we saw (while we had good interactions they were by no means epic) but because of the people with whom we were diving. In addition to world-class professional photographers and a woman who co-founded a shark conservation network, we had the incredible honour of spending our week with the three people who pioneered shark diving: Stan Waterman and Ron & Valerie Taylor. Between them, Valerie, Ron, and Stan have 150 years of diving experience, thousands of dives all over the world, and countless hours of underwater footage. It was as wonderful as it was entertaining to sit around the dinner table and listen to them retell tales of their adventures. On several evenings we were treated to some short films Stan had made from footage of other dive trips. We were thankful to have been given the opportunity to meet the people who were at least partially responsible for our interest in diving. 
 The Conclusion I had an incredible, fantastic week! The diving was really a dream come true, being surrounded by dozens of my favourite creatures. And it would have been hard to imagine more appropriate company than we had. I am already looking ahead to see when we can next go out and swim with the sharks. >{{{*> See all the photos here. 5 January 10 By now I think we've all heard various stories of impending environmental doom. Stories like "Humans are causing mass extinctions," "Coral reefs are dying," and "All the world's fisheries will collapse by 2050" are commonplace in the news, but at the same time it is quite easy to shrug those things off as something that will happen in the future. Sadly, I think the future is now. Sea lions have been called the canary in the coal mine that is our ocean. They are an important sentinel species as they inhabit the same coastal areas, prey on the same types of fish, and contract the same diseases as many people. And now they're dying--what does this mean? California sea lions (Zalophus californianus) are found along the western coast of the U.S. and Mexico, with a subspecies (Zalophus californianus wollebacki) found in the Galapagos, and number about 200,000. During the summer of 2009, The Marine Mammal Center rescued 1698 animals, approximately 1400 of which were California sea lions. That number is three times the number of animals rescued in an average year. Why were we swamped with sea lions? Because they were starving to death. I don't have an exact number handy, but I'd estimate that at least 1000 of the animals we rescued were yearlings. Pregnant sea lions give birth in June, and before doing so they will "kick out" the previous year's pup, leaving it to fend on its own. But this past summer there were no fish to be found, and the yearling pups began starving and dying by the thousands. For awhile, you couldn't go to a central California beach and not see at least one dead sea lion. It wasn't just the yearlings that were starving; newborn pups in two Southern California rookeries experienced a mortality rate of more than 28% (normal mortality rate is 6%), and at least two species of cormorant--Brandt's and Double-crested--experienced significant starvation events during Summer 2009 as well. So, why are there no fish for these animals to eat? Where did the fish go? The National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) reported a "disruption in the coastal upwelling process off central and northern California during May and June" which would have affected nutrient distribution, and therefore the entire food web. Basically, small prey fish would have moved off in search of food, and larger predators (fish, birds, and marine mammals alike) would normally follow them. But small, inexperienced, comparatively weak yearling sea lions and nursing mothers were unable to travel far out to sea in search of food and thus could not eat. There's also the issue of overfishing. It is a well-known fact that fisheries around the world are in decline, and some major fisheries have already collapsed. Close to home, the herring fishery in San Francisco Bay was closed by the state Fish and Game Commission this past September. Herring are a major prey species for sea lions, and local fishermen are saying there are none around. The truth is, upwellings or not, there just aren't as many fish out there in the oceans as people might think. As if that wasn't enough, San Francisco's famed sea lion colony at Pier 39 has vanished. A record 1701 animals were counted on the Pier October 23rd, 20 were there on November 28th, and today there are between zero and 6. Some tagged animals were reported to have travelled south to the Monterey Bay area, while others were said to have moved north to Oregon. It is highly suspected that the animals moved away in search of food. So, in case you're wondering what the death of the oceans is going to look like, well, open your eyes. We're watching the beginning of the largest extinction event of the past 65 million years. Hang on; it's going to be a rough ride. 1 January 10 Looking back: For the first time in many, many years I made a New Year's resolution at the beginning of 2009: To Make A Difference. I had some vague ideas of how to go about doing so; I wanted to make a difference in the health of the oceans and the conservation of the creatures within. I was able to do little bits and pieces of that--I got a couple of friends to stop eating fish, I became more active in little things like informing others of issues and signing petitions--but my main goal was to turn The Marine Mammal Center into a "green" organization and really underscore the conservation aspect involved. That main goal has gotten off the ground, but isn't yet fully underway. We have organized a team of people to address and work on areas of improvement, but it is slow going, especially since we're a non-profit staffed by over-worked employees and volunteers. I am going to continue to push through with that project, as well as keep my eyes open for other projects and avenues. Looking forward: Saving the world is nice and fine, but it doesn't do me any good unless I'm also happy and healthy. My new goal for this year is To Take Care Of Myself. The main components of this are eating healthy and exercising, but it stretches further than that. In order to eat healthy I also need to cook my meals (no more takeout when I'm feeling lazy), and in order to feel happy I have to pay attention to my mental state. I started my New Year by going for a walk around the neighborhood. It's filled with hills which make for good exercise, and it sure is quiet at 8am on New Year's morning, when everyone else is sleeping off their hangovers! | |||
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