An Inexhaustible Supply

 

Distance becomes obsolete

     with nothing to sound it out--a vast waste of water,

eerily blue green and coming up empty-handed--the

schools of fish are dead,

     not even a corpse left to rot.

 

         When I was a child, my father used to like to tell us how things were when he was young. These stories always began with "When I was a boy, …." We would look at each other and roll our eyes; "Oh no, not again!" Once he told us that when he was a boy, there were whales in Monterey Bay. In fact, one day in a storm, a whale got caught in the Santa Cruz wharf. It caused considerable damage and the pier had to be rebuilt. He also remembered seeing whaling boats with harpoons in the bay killing these massive creatures. Although we lived in Santa Cruz throughout much of my childhood, I never once saw a whale there.

         Next to our house in Santa Cruz was a large lagoon, the Santa Maria Del Mar lagoon, that stretched about a mile back from the beach. A small stream emptied into it at the east side, and at high tide the waves washed salt water into it, so it was a brackish lagoon. We were strictly forbidden to swim in the water as we were told we would risk getting polio. The polio vaccine hadn't yet been developed, and polio was probably the most serious debilitating condition known.

The lagoon was nevertheless a favorite site for childhood adventures, and we often hiked along the edge, sometimes going all the way back to the fresh water stream. Occasionally my father accompanied us on these adventures. He would tell us, "When I was a boy, there used to be dozens of turtles swimming in the upper lagoon." These amazing creatures held a real fascination for me, so I searched and searched for turtles during my numerous excursions. However, much to my very genuine disappointment, I never saw one.

         Although I never spotted a whale in Monterey Bay or a turtle in the nearby lagoons, we kids did have real-life adventures. Sometimes we'd be looking down at the ocean from our porch which overlooked the bay, when vast schools of small fish, tens of thousands of them, would appear swimming just beneath the surface. Dozens of diving pelicans, each one followed by a couple of seagulls, would tip us off. These fish were only 2-4 inches long, and I had no idea what they were. My father knew them well, however, and told us they were sometimes anchovies, but more often sardines. We'd go out in the waves with our butterfly nets (we were avid butterfly collectors) and would try to catch 'em. In fact, we did catch a few, and then we'd take them home as trophies, very proud of our catch. Of course, we also broke a lot of butterfly nets.

Whenever sardines or anchovies were sighted, we could be sure that within hours, the sardine boats would appear on the horizon. They might stay a day or two before disappearing, but then the fish would be gone. I haven't seen large schools of these little fish anywhere along the California coast in several decades.

         Today I went for my morning ocean swim before biking up the Torrey Pines hill to start my day at the University of California, San Diego. As I was coming out of the water onto the dry sand, I stopped short. There on the beach were several small, oval-shaped, blue-green jelly fish-like creatures, about 2-3 inches long, with clear "sails" sticking up from their flattish bodies. They were dead, of course. I hadn't seen one of these creatures, dead or alive, for years, but I remembered seeing them in profusion as a boy in Santa Cruz. We used to call them "By the Wind Sailors" or "Portuguese Men of War." Sometimes we'd go down to the beach following a storm, and it would be literally covered with By the Wind Sailors, so deep we couldn't even see the sand. We hated it when this happened. It'd be OK for a few days, but then they'd begin to stink. The stench was overwhelming; from even a quarter of a mile away, one could smell the sickening odor.

What caused the Sailors to wash up and die, I never knew. I still don't know if this massive accumulation of dead sea life resulted from natural causes or from man's intervention. I recall my father telling me it had to do with changing currents and water temperatures. However, the fact that such catastrophes occurred illustrated to me that sea life existed in quantities that we couldn't even imagine. The fact that we seldom see these amazing creatures anymore, even in small numbers, alive in the water or dead on the beaches, suggests that they just don't exist in profusion anymore, anywhere on Earth.

         Occasionally my father took us kids deep-sea fishing. We'd pay a nominal sum to board a fishing barge, and the captain would take us out into the bay; not far, maybe ten or fifteen minutes from shore, where he thought the fishing might be good. In fact, in a good spot, the fishing was fantastic! If you put your line down with two baited hooks, you'd bring up two fish within less than a minute; if you had three hooks on your line, you'd bring up three. We'd bring back maybe fifty to a hundred fish each, take ‘em home and clean them in preparation for dinner. That was a real chore and not the part I enjoyed, but my father insisted we use whatever we caught. Apparently his father had loved fishing, but not wanting to clean the dead fish, he'd go from door to door, asking the neighbors if they'd take ‘em. Since we could eat only a small fraction of the catch at any one sitting, we'd freeze the rest. I remember how tired of fish we sometimes became.

I also remember that many folks went on these fishing trips, usually middle-aged or older men, as I recall, just for the sport. They enjoyed catching the fish but like my grandfather, didn't want to be bothered to clean or eat ‘em. Upon returning, they'd just leave the dead fish on the wharf for anyone to take, or they'd just throw them into the sea. The wharf attendants would throw away the remainder at the end of the day if they hadn't been taken. I occasionally biked the five or six miles to the wharf just to take a couple of the larger ones, but most were left to rot. It didn't once occur to me that years later this might be considered a crime, or that fishing might be regulated; I never imagined that it was possible to some day deplete the vast oceans of their denizens.

         Early one Sunday morning just a few weeks ago, my lifelong friend Tay and I were taking a walk on Moonlight beach in Encinitas when we saw a large California lobster lying motionless on the beach close to the surf line. My immediate assumption was that it was dead, but I picked it up and it's legs started moving. I put it down with a start but then decided to take it out to sea. Since the California lobster lacks pincers, I knew it couldn't harm me. I took it out beyond the waves before letting it go. If I'd left it on the beach, someone would certainly have found it and taken it home to supplement a meal. How sad it is that people would kill such an exotic and now rare creature just for a bite or two of flesh.

         These thoughts caused me to reflect on my first years in San Diego, some 30 years ago, when I first took scuba diving lessons from Bert Kobayashi. We'd go off the La Jolla shore, pry a few abalone off the rocks and prepare them for a wonderful meal, first slicing them thin, then pounding the meat for about 15 minutes to make it tender, and finally breading and frying the sliced meat. The flavor was exquisite. Bert told me that when he'd first come to San Diego, abs were ten times more plentiful, and California lobsters were crawling on the beaches, abundant enough for everyone to take. They'd largely disappeared before we moved to San Diego. Nowadays neither lobsters nor abs can be found in appreciable numbers anywhere along the California coast.

         I recently went to a lecture held at the UCSD Faculty Club where the speaker, a Professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO), explained that for every commercially important fish, that is, for virtually any species of fish that grows to a size greater than two inches in length, the current worldwide oceanic populations are seldom greater than 1% of that which existed before the industrial revolution. He also noted that in spite of many attempts to replenish these populations, poachers have always thwarted such efforts. Although many well-intentioned environmentalists have tried to replenish local supplies, their efforts have consistently met with failure.

Upon hearing this I recalled my father's stories as well as my childhood experiences in Santa Cruz. It reminded me that the few deep-sea fishing trips I've been on during the past 20 years have been sadly disappointing experiences compared to those of my childhood. The most typical experience was that, of the hundreds of people who were on board, most would catch nothing, and only a few, if any, would catch enough to even pay for the trip. I've been told that if one goes far off the Baja coast on 3-4 day fishing trips, one can sometimes hope to catch good sized eating fish. However, I know folks who have taken such trips and gotten nothing.

Last year I was on the Ph.D. thesis committee of an SIO graduate student whose research topic dealt with coral diseases. I learned that one-third of the world's coral reefs are dead, one third are sick or dying, and only one third are still healthy. The nature and causes of coral diseases are still poorly understood. In most cases, the causative agents haven't been identified. Since these reefs are the primary breeding grounds for innumerable species of fish, I came to the shocking realization that regardless of restrictions, regulations, and even potentially successful attempts at enforcement, the oceanic fish populations will never return to what was once normal. The human populations have achieved what I as a boy never dreamt possible: we have consumed 99% of the natural sea life worldwide. This and other human promoted environmental disasters reveal that unless the human population is reduced to a small fraction of its present size, there will be no hope that conditions will ever be the same again.