Deep Sea News

Enter the Ady Gil (formerly the Earthrace).

No, this isn’t the Knight Rider of the harbor. This batmobile of conservation is now the newest member of the  Sea Shepherd team, also known as Team Sink-A-Boat-For-Whales. From Sea Shepherd’s press office:

Due to its speed capabilities, up to 50 knots, Captain Paul Watson (Sea Shepherd President and Founder) intends to use the Ady Gil to intercept and physically block the harpoon ships from illegally slaughtering whales.

Says Captain Watson, “We’re very excited that the Ady Gil will be joining the Steve Irwin in Antarctica this campaign. With these two ships, we will mount the most ambitious and aggressive effort to date to obstruct the slaughter of the whales in the Southern Ocean.”

Says Chuck Swift, Deputy CEO in charge of ship’s operations, “The Ady Gil gives us the speed necessary to catch and stay with the Japanese whaling fleet. We are very optimistic that with these two ships, and some other surprises, we will shut down whaling in the Antarctic Whale Sanctuary.”

Thats your hard earned donor’s dollars work. Saving whales and stuff man. But let us take a moment to reflect on the manner in which Sea Shepherd operates the “normal” ship they already mismanage.

(Below the fold)

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Editor’s Note: This entry is written entirely by Brian Linton, the 22 year old President and founder of Sand Shack LLC. He reached out to us as a fan of what we were doing. After talking with him for a bit, I was impressed by his enthusiasm and how he has made ocean conservation and outreach a business plan. I was interested in his views on the symbiosis that business and conservation can take and asked if he would be interested in writing a short guest blog post. I am sure he will be willing to answer any further questions in the comments.

I am very interested in the role business can play in conservation efforts and would love to hear from anyone with a unique perspective on this. Contact me if you would like to contribute a guest post. – KAZ

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Brian Linton

Growing up in Singapore I had the opportunity to travel to countless beaches and oceans around the world. I’ve seen the good, the bad, and the ugly. After realizing the enormous problems our oceans face I decided I would do something about it.  I wanted to change the world, save the oceans, and preserve our beaches through the use of business.  Hence, Sand Shack was born.

Since founding Sand Shack while still in college during the summer of 2006, it has grown into a prominent brand of ocean-friendly apparel and accessories with nearly 200 stores across the United States carrying our products.  And despite the recession, we have seen tremendous growth in the last year.

Ocean Conservation As a Distinguishing Feature

Unlike many companies that associate themselves with an environmental mission, our focus on ocean conservation is not just an element of our company – it is the backbone.  I realized early on that business was the perfect vessel to do a tremendous amount of good and change the world in which we live.  Due to my upbringing and love for the ocean, ocean conservation was the obvious thing I wanted to build a business around.

In building my company I want to make sure that everyone who comes into contact with the brand knows about our mission.  Sometimes I am so enthusiastic about introducing our company’s mission that the product becomes secondary.  And with the recent increased media coverage of the issues associated with our oceans (most notably the trash “island” in the pacific) people are taking note to what we are doing.

Creative Capitalism is Good For Our Oceans

The truth of the matter is we are making money off of the oceans problems.

Hold on…

Before you crucify me let me explain how this works out for the good of the oceans.

Last year I read an article by Bill Gates on creative capitalism. In the article he made some good points, but the most important point he made was, basically, doing good is good for business.  Creative capitalism is about using capitalism to build business while bettering the world. The companies who are sincerely working to solve our world’s problems end up benefiting from the associated publicity and good will of those who choose to buy their products.

Using the principals of creative capitalism, we have been able to leverage our mission for ocean conservation and grow our business. But we ARE doing real work, and for creative capitalism to work this is truly important – and being capitalist means that the more we grow, the more money we make, the more good we can do for our cause.   I believe that a business is much more self sustaining and scalable than a non-profit group in the long run – and if used correctly, can contribute a tremendous amount to a needy cause.

What We Have Done and What we Are Doing

This past summer we hosted 3 events centered on building awareness for ocean conservation. Our biggest event was held in Stone Harbor, NJ on the Jersey Shore. The event, called Keep it Blue, was to educate children and families about the oceans eco-system. That day we had nearly 1000 people pass through the event, all leaving with a positive message about ocean conservation.  In addition to all the ocean conservation events and beach cleanups we host we also donate 5% of our company proceeds to ocean conservation efforts outside our company.

We are still a small company, but as we grow I look forward to doing more and more good for our oceans.  In running a business I meet a lot of people, and through these meetings I realize just how overlooked the problems associated with our oceans are.  Sand Shack has given me the power and ability to communicate these issues on a platform I would not have without business.

In the end, I want to build a wildly successful business…and I want to change the world while doing it.

—

Written by Brian Linton.

Become a fan of Sand Shack on Facebook here: www.facebook.com/sandshack.

Get $5 off any order of $10 or more at Sand Shack when you enter “dsnrocks” in the coupon code box at checkout.

…because it has already happened.  During a conference this summer, I heard Jeremy Jackson give talk.  He highlighted the severely degraded state, as measured by just about any metric, of Caribbean reefs.  Observe one of his talks or take a quick read of his papers and you will find yourself in the fetal position crying.  Choice quotes from his papers

A whitetip shark. I'm personally surprised they are still around

• Comparison of Pleistocene and modern community structure shows that Recent human impacts have changed coral community structure in ways not observed in the preceding 220 000 years
• The overall historical trajectory of reef degradation across all cultural periods is strikingly linear, despite the wide range of values within any one cultural period. Most importantly from the perspective of reef conservation and management, most of the reef ecosystems were substantially degraded before 1900.
• Populations of endangered Caribbean sea turtles are far more depleted than realized because current conservation assessments do not reflect historic nesting data…Our results indicate that 20% of historic nesting sites have been lost entirely and 50% of the remaining nesting sites have been reduced to dangerously low populations.
• The productivity and biomass of pristine coral reef ecosystems is poorly understood, particularly in the Caribbean where communities have been impacted by overfishing and multiple other stressors over centuries. Using historical data on the spatial distribution and abundance of the extinct Caribbean monk
  seal (Monachus tropicalis), this study reconstructs the population size, structure and ecological role of this once common predator within coral reef communities, and provides evidence that historical reefs supported biomasses of fishes and invertebrates up to six times greater than those found on typical modern Caribbean reefs. An estimated 233 000–338 000 monk seals were distributed among 13 colonies across the Caribbean. The biomass of reef fishes and invertebrates required to support historical seal populations was 732–1018 g mK2 of reefs, which exceeds that found on any Caribbean reef today and is comparable with those measured in remote Pacific reefs. Quantitative estimates of historically dense monk seal colonies and their consumption rates on pristine reefs provide concrete data on the magnitude of decline in animal biomass on Caribbean coral reefs. Realistic reconstruction of these past ecosystems is critical to understanding the profound and long-lasting effect of human hunting on the functioning of coral reef ecosystems.
• Ecological extinction caused by overfishing precedes all other pervasive human disturbance to coastal ecosystems, including pollution, degradation
  of water quality, and anthropogenic climate change. Historical abundances of large consumer species were fantastically large in comparison
  with recent observations. Paleoecological, archaeological, and historical data show that time lags of decades to centuries occurred between the
  onset of overfishing and consequent changes in ecological communities, because unfished species of similar trophic level assumed the ecological
  roles of overfished species until they too were overfished or died of epidemic diseases related to overcrowding.

Corals…gone, turtles…gone, fish…gone, seals…gone, and all the other species yet to be quantified…gone.

That is what 95% coral cover looks like

So that was to be the post.  Everyone feels nauseous or a least ‘environmental degradation’ induced vertigo. But then I get this email from Jives

This weekend I opened my inbox to find some powerful words from Les Kaufman about coral reef ecology. He’s writing reports from the Enderbury Island dive site in the Phoenix Islands Expedition. On Sunday he wrote: “This is the first time I’ve felt, with full conviction, that the reduction
of human coastal impacts could significantly help the ocean to heal itself.”

This morning I put up a post that explained why: “The moment we dropped into the sea just off NAI’A’s bow in the lee of Enderbury, our mouths fell agape and stayed that way for the entire dive and a good while afterwards. A fully regenerated reef! Over 90% coral cover, sharks, dogtooth tuna and the joy of having a good reason to be careful about neutral bouyancy. The transect methodology was the same tired old routine, but we felt like whistling the entire time.”

The 2005 expedition found these reefs severely damaged by a coral bleaching incident. The research team has been cautiously optimistic until now… But this seems to border on full-on optimism. Reading the posts as they go up, I get a pretty good idea of what’s going on with the expedition, but the power of that statement kind of overwhelmed me, especially coming from Dr. Kaufman.

Since you may not have seen this before...this is what healthy reef looks like

What? There is hope?  This email combined with the OCEAN initiative by David “WhySharksMatter” Shiffman are actually make me a bit warm an fuzzy.  In case you haven’t heard…

I am announcing the formation of a new volunteer-based conservation group : the Online Community Environmental Action Network (OCEAN). The purpose of this group is to use online resources  to spread conservation related information. Members of OCEAN will help spread the word about certain blog posts, petitions, multimedia resources, and conservation websites. They will do this via the following online resources [Facebook, Digg, Neatorama, Twitter]

Take some time and head over to the Southern Fried Scientist to learn more about this important effort and how you can join. Do it because I am tired of losing sleepless nights, curled in the fetal position, weeping

October 30-31st you can catch the Coral: Symbol, Substance, and Significance conference in the Big Apple. Mercer R. Brugler a graduate student at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette will be giving a 1 hour presentation titled “What is a Coral?”.  Brugler specialty is deep-sea coral evolution, so I am sure the presentation will be slanted toward everybody’s favorite environment.

Symbol, Substance, and Significance will be a comprehensive examination of this astonishing organism, exploring its place in both the natural world and in the realm of culture where it has been a traditional material for art objects and jewelry. Beginning with the role of coral within the reef and the criticality of coral reefs to ocean ecology – and thus to human existence – we will turn to forces threatening reef survival, and to efforts being made by scientists, governments, and nongovernmental organizations to protect and restore them. We will address laws and treaties formulated to govern trade in coral, a substance that has been termed “too precious to wear.” And we will examine coral in history, both its evolving associations over time and its traditional place in the wunderkammer. Last, we will explore its changing role and use in jewelry, art, and fashion, with specific discussion of the move both to the mimetic use coral alternatives and the symbolic use of coral as an inspiration. Initiatives in Art and Culture has a long-standing commitment to explorations both of cultural patrimony and of art and ornament. In Coral, we again celebrate the object by placing it in the broadest possible context, discussing strategies and approaches to ensuring its sustainability.

Among those who have agreed to speak are: Michael Kowalski, Chairman and CEO of Tiffany & Co.; Richard E. Dodge, professor and dean, Nova Southeastern University (NSU) Oceanographic Institute and Executive Director of the Center’s Coral Reef Institute (NCRI); Michele Oka Doner, artist whose breadth of artistic production encompasses public art, sculpture, furniture, jewelry, and functional objects, a significant number of which draw inspiration from coral and the sea; Godfrey Reggio, producer and director, who is prominent in the film world for his Qatsi trilogy (Koyaanisqatsi, Powaqqatsi, and Naqqyqatsi, music by Philip Glass) which conveys a humanist philosophy about the earth, chronicling the destructive impact of the modern world on the environment, and for Anima Mundi, (music also by Philip Glass); David Wolfe, creative director and chief forecaster of Doneger and Co.; Sarah Graham, jeweler whose point of departure for her coral inspired work are the plates of the zoologist and contemporary of Darwin, Ernst Haeckel, published in Art Forms in Nature; Steve D’Esposito, president RESOLVE and formerly president, Earthworks Action; Dawn Martin, president of SeaWeb; and Géza von Habsburg, an art historian who has served as chairman of two auction houses and whose numerous publications include Princely Treasures (1997) and several definitive volumes on Fabergé. The conference is organized by Lisa Koenigsberg, president and founder, Initiatives in Art and Culture.

Student Horseshoe Crab and the Arts contest winner

The Ecological Research & Development Group (ERDG), a non-profit wildlife conservation organization founded in 1995 with the primary focus conserving the four remaining horseshoe crab species, announced the flip’em campaign.

Our Just flip ‘em! program is designed to bring attention to the hundreds of thousands of horseshoe crabs (Limulus polyphemus) who die each year from stranding (stuck upside down) during their yearly spawning ritual and to encourage individuals, through a simple act of compassion, to take the time to assist and appreciate these remarkable creatures, who will not survive public indifference.

The idea is simple: when you see a horseshoe crab that is stranded upside down on the beach, just flip them over. It’s important not to flip them by their tail, however. Even though it looks scary, the tail is very delicate and can be easily damaged. The best way to turn them over is by the edge of their shell. No need to be cautious; the horseshoe crab doesn’t bite or sting and it’s claws are very gentle and won’t hurt you.

Make sure you catch the mp3 of the Just flip’em song!

(Verse 1)
If you take a little walk down by the sea
You just might find some horseshoe crabs washed up on the beach.
And if theyʼre stranded upside down and if their legs are in the air,
Tell yourself, “Iʼm gonna help them out; Iʼm gonna walk right over there.
(Chorus)
Just flip ʻem, flip ʻem over. Flip ʻem over, let them live.
Just flip ʻem, flip ʻem over. They need all the help we have to give them.
Flip ʻem, flip ʻem over and very soon youʼll see
Those horseshoe crabs will be making their way back home to the sea.

A few days ago DSN received a letter from one of our fans,

[sic]

To whom it may concern,
After reviewing your comments concerning the Sea Shepard, it is quite apparent that you do not appose the killing of whales by the Japanese!! It is also apparent that you support such actions by these savages!! The efforts that the crew of the Sea Shepard have put into such a mission, I’m sure is more then any of you have accomplished in a lifetime. It’s to bad there are poeple like you who only bring negativity through the media. Their couragous fight will continue!!!!

With Much regret,
D.L. [full name removed]
[location removed]
Animal and Marine Advocate

We always appreciate our readers emailing us and expressing their opinions. Ad hominem attacks not so much.  There is no doubt that our Sea Shepherd post has energized a certain contingent.  What continues to bother me is that people believe certain that topics or institutions are above critical examination.  You cannot critique religion or church, United States government, conservation organizations, nonprofits, and many others.  To do such is to be labeled antireligious, unamerican, a commie pinko bastard or, as purported by D.L., a person supporting whaling  by the Japanese.  But a firm commitment to any cause, including conservation, is a consistent reexamination to ensure that goals are being met.  T0 proceed in an ineffective manner that wastes time and funds, or is even detrimental to the cause, does a disservice to stakeholders, donors, and those dedicated to the particular mission at hand.

To not regularly reexamine an organization’s actions means you deteriorate the very cause you are working for. Sea Shepherd consistently dodges criticisms and point to anecdotes that favor its positions without providing evidence that can be corroborated by an uninvolved party.  Currently, there is more support for whale conservation than ever among the public.  You would be hard pressed to find someone who says “Let’s kill the whales!” A thoughtful and strategic plan that capitalizes on this growing public support is likely to make great advancements.  Yet Sea Shepherd has adopted an ecoterrorism approach instead of environmentalism, polarizing the public much the same way PETA and the Animal Liberation Front do.  A peer-reviewed, academic paper written by experts on global terrorism trends and Sea Shepherd  found it difficult to classify the organization

“… we also note that on the one hand, it may be possible to argue that in some respects the Sea Shepherds may constitute either a “blind spot” in the literature on terrorism and political violence, because its actions could in some circumstances be considered activism, militant direct action, piracy, vigilantism, terrorism, or eco-defense, which makes it very difficult to classify. On the other hand, that both the Sea Shepherds and the whalers may both engage in illegal activities, but are not prosecuted, may indicate that states and the international community may have neither the will nor the means to enforce laws against them. Therefore, they may be turning a blind eye to their actions.”

The authors concluded that

“Despite the ambiguity surrounding their legal status and academic interpretations of their actions, the results of nearly three decades of the organization’s activities, including its 2007 campaign to disrupt Japanese Antarctic Whaling, suggest that the Sea Shepherds may be best categorized as a vigilante group, because they claim they are seeking to enforce a legal status quo because of states’ and the international community’s inabilities or unwillingness to do so.”

If we look at the United Nations Convention on the High Seas (Article 101) and the Convention on the Law of the Sea the definition of piracy is

(a) any illegal acts of violence or detention, or any act of depredation committed for private ends by the crew or the passengers of a private ship or a private aircraft, and directed

(i) on the high seas, against another ship or aircraft, or against persons or property on board such ship or aircraft
(ii) against a ship, aircraft, persons or property in a place outside the jurisdiction of any State;

(b) any act of voluntary participation in the operation of the ship or of an aircraft with knowledge of facts making it a pirate ship or aircraft.

Sea Shepherd are pirates (and characterize themselves as such), and many countries (Canada, Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Belize, United States) now have revoked registry for the group.  Sea Shepherd cannot fly several countries’ flags in disregard of maritime law.

GreenPeace has even criticized Sea Shepard:

Paul Watson became active with Greenpeace in 1971 as a member of our second expedition against nuclear weapons testing in Amchitka, and went on to participate in actions against whaling and the killing of harp seals.  He was an influential early member but not, as he sometimes claims, a founder. He was expelled from the leadership of Greenpeace in 1977 by a vote of 11 to one (only Watson himself voted against it). Bob Hunter (one of Greenpeace’s early leaders, after whom a Sea Shepherd vessel was named) described the event in his book, the Greenpeace Chronicles:

‘No one doubted his [Watson's] courage for a moment. He was a great warrior brother. Yet in terms of the Greenpeace gestalt, he seemed possessed by too powerful a drive, too unrelenting a desire to push himself front and center, shouldering everyone else aside… He had consistently gone around to other offices, acting out the role of mutineer. Everywhere he went, he created divisiveness… We all felt we’d got trapped in a web no one wanted to see develop, yet now that it had, there was nothing to do but bring down the axe, even if it meant bringing it down on the neck of our brother.”

Watson founded his own group, Sea Shepherd, in 1977.

• in 1986, Sea Shepherd carried out an action against the Icelandic whaling station in Hvalfjoerdur and sank two Icelandic whaling vessels in Reykjavik harbor by opening their sea valves;[1]
• in December 1992, Sea Shepherd sank the vessel Nybroena in port;[2]
• Sea Shepherd claimed to have sank the Taiwanese drift net ship Jiang Hai in port in Taiwan and to have rammed and disabled four other Asian drift net ships;[3]
• a Canadian court ordered Watson and his former ship, the Cleveland Armory, to pay a total of $35,000 for ramming a Cuban fishing vessel off the coast of Newfoundland in June 1993;[4]
• in January 1994 the group severely damaged the whaling ship Senet in the Norwegian port of Gressvik.[5]

Each of the whaling ships noted above was refloated and refitted for continued whaling…Although Paul Watson is a vehement anti-whaling activist, he regularly lends his support to attacks on Greenpeace — some of them organized by the whalers themselves. [8]…We passionately want to stop whaling, and will do so peacefully. That’s why we won’t help Sea Shepherd. Greenpeace is committed to non-violence and we’ll never, ever, change that; not for anything. If we helped Sea Shepherd to find the whaling fleet we’d be responsible for anything they did having got that information, and history shows that they’ve used violence in the past, in the most dangerous seas on Earth. For us, non-violence is a non-negotiable, precious principle. Greenpeace will continue to act to defend the whales, but will never attack or endanger the whalers.We differ with Paul Watson on what constitutes violence. He states that nobody has ever been harmed by a Sea Shepherd action.  But the test of non-violence is the nature of your action, not whether harm results or not.  There are many acts of violence — for example, holding a gun to someone’s head — which result in no harm.  That doesn’t change their nature. We believe that throwing butryic acid at the whalers, dropping cables to foul their props, and threatening to ram them in the freezing waters of the Antarctic constitutes violence because of the potential consequences. The fact that the consequences have not been realized is irrelevant. In addition to being morally wrong, we believe the use of violence in protection of whales to be a tactical error. If there’s one way to harden Japanese public opinion and ensure whaling continues, it’s to use violent tactics against their fleet. It’s wrong because it puts human lives at risk, and it’s wrong because it makes the whalers stronger in Japan…Disabling a ship at sea in the Antarctic, regardless of how much one may object to its activities, is not only a callous act of disregard for human life — it’s courting an environmental disaster in one of the most fragile environments in the world. (see article at GreenPeace for information on footnotes, especially [8])

From a New York Times article

In “Earthforce!,” Watson advises readers to make up facts and figures when they need to, and to deliver them to reporters confidently, “as Ronald Reagan did.” Several years after ramming the Sierra, Watson gave himself the title of captain, though he does not have a captain’s license. “He loves to dress up in uniform, as ‘Captain Paul Watson,’ and suddenly there’s enough gold braid on his shoulders to skipper the Queen Mary,” David Sellers, an old friend and former Sea Shepherd crew member, told me. In the eighties, Sellers and Watson fought so bitterly over the seaworthiness of Watson’s ship that they did not speak for fifteen years. (Sellers, a licensed captain, had insisted that it was not safe for ocean travel.) Many of Watson’s colleagues from the seventies and eighties no longer work with him; they have grown tired either of the campaigns or of Watson’s style of leadership—“anarchy run by God,” a longtime volunteer called it. “He doesn’t like people who disagree with him.”

Watson’s brand of truthiness is often criticized by other conservation organizations and conservationists. Even among organizations who have similar end goals, they are deemed as destructive to the overall cause of conservation. Yet those opposing Watson’s acts, people often very committed to the ultimate cause, are demonized by the organization’s supporters.  The general public is often turned off by the extremism.  Reducing your support, dividing your base, making enemies of your compatriots, and relying on blind faith is not effective conservation.

Whether we here at DSN have accomplished anything for marine conservation through our writings, research, volunteering, support of effective organizations like MCBI, Oceana, or CORAL, is for our readers to decide. We may not be experts in how to accomplish conservation, but we are certainly knowledgeable enough to understand how to not achieve said goals.

Nagtzaam, G., & Lentini, P. (2008). Vigilantes on the High Seas?: The Sea Shepherds and Political Violence Terrorism and Political Violence, 20 (1), 110-133 DOI: 10.1080/09546550701723658

-Signed Dr. M and Kevin Z

This is the question that has been floating around the marine blogs this week.  The complaint is that Discovery Channel “is promoting negative stereotypes about sharks at a time when we should be promoting conservation,” i.e. portraying sharks as evil, vicious mankillers.  Of course, and rightly so, this has not set well with conservationists.  Last year a group of shark conservationists last year met with the Discovery Channel for over four hours.  Although the specific outcomes of that meeting are not clear, it appears little has changed.  According to the Biochemical Soul,

keep in mind the titles of the first few shows for Shark Week when you read Paul’s answers: the 2 hour premier “Blood in the Water,” followed by “Deadly Waters,” followed by “Day of the Shark 2″ (about “when a great white breaks through a 300-pound aluminum shark cage and traps the divers inside. Another shark tackles a former Navy Seal in shallow waters”), followed by “Sharkbite Summer” (about “The bite-by-bite account of America’s notorious “Summer of the Shark” in 2001.”)

WhySharksMatter at the Southern Fried Scientist scored an interview with Paul Gasek, Senior Science Editor and Executive Producer for the Discovery Channel asking him a series of insightful but tough questions posed by readers at the blog.  Overall, I am personally unimpressed, indeed really unimpressed, with Gasek’s answers.  They are deflective, shallow, and canned, aimed more at defending the status quo and Discovery Channel’s actions than real critical examination.  As one of the commenters at Southern Fried Scientist, a shark conservationists who participated in the meeting last year, states “they care about sharks uniquely in terms of how much money they can make from them.”  Let’s face it Discovery Channel is a for profit business owned by the publicly traded Discovery Holding Company with a board and stock holders that are answered to. The business model is not to educate or conserve it is to make money.

So do vicious shark attacks sell?  Discovery Channel thinks so.  The same commenter from above also said in this meeting that Gasek referred proudly to the programming of shark week as shark porn.  I tend to disagree.  To echo the point made by Irradiatus, “I feel really sad for people who think that just because something is factual then its ipso facto “stone cold boring”. You don’t have to make a documentary into a craptastic stereotypical fear-mongering piece of eye-candy to make it fascinating. Anyone seen “Planet Earth”?”  I think when you rely on the cheap sale it does not demonstrate insight into what the public wants but rather laziness and lack of creativity on your part to get the public excited about something else.

The readers of Southern Fried Scientist came up with these ideas in less than a week

My readers have suggested dozens of other types of documentaries than those that focus on sharks attacking people. One notes that since sharks are such well adapted hunters, that simply watching them hunt for seals or fish should offer plenty of thrills to DC’s viewers. Several suggested showing movies about the shark fin fishery, or how sharks are crucial to marine ecosystems. One suggested a movie about some of the world’s weirdest sharks (many deepwater animals are crazy looking), another suggestion was to follow a shark-killing tournament while interspersing conservation facts, another involves shark tanks in aquariums around the world. Others suggest a show about animals in the ocean deadlier than sharks, such as venomous animals. I saw two great conservation-minded documentaries at the BLUE Ocean Film Festival: “Requiem”, a woman’s quest to swim with the world’s most dangerous sharks to learn if they really are dangerous (interspersed with conservation facts throughout), and “Shark Nicole/Great White Shark Odyssey”, which chronicled the life of an individual shark and the threats she faced as she migrated across the oceans. There are many more suggestions as well.

I want to return however to address what concerned me the most and prompted me to write this post.  From Southern Fried Scientist…

WSM: Do you believe that how movies, the news, and networks like the Discovery Channel portray sharks affects how the public views sharks? For example, in the scientific community, it is widely acknowledged that the movie Jaws has encouraged public fear of sharks. We can’t help but notice that a poster for this year’s Shark Week bears a strong resemblance to the movie poster for Jaws. Though your website has lots of conservation information, do you believe that some of your programming promotes fear of sharks?

PG: At Discovery Channel, we pride ourselves on telling compelling and accurate stories.  Shark Week is no different.  Two of our shows this year are based on actual historical events: one is about the first U.S.-based shark attacks on record, off the New Jersey shore in 1916, and the other is about the infamous summer of 2001 when more than 50 swimmers were attacked by sharks off U.S. beaches.  It is a fact that sharks sometimes mistake people for prey and attack.  In these, and many of our shows, we are digging deeper than the media headlines and telling the stories behind the stories.

In light of these comments it clear that Discovery Channel has not intention of dropping the sensationalized mankiller programming. Indeed this year a mysterious swag box was sent out to bloggers around the net. The PR stunt was a box filled with a handwritten note “This jar holds a story – the story of a single tragic incident that needs to be unlocked. Dive in, investigate the evidence and discover what lies beneath the surface of frenziedwaters.com”, a jar filled with a large shark tooth, a boat key on a float, a swimsuit with a shark bite out of it, a beach closed to swimmers sign, etc. These boxes, noticeably and likely intentionally not sent to any of the ocean bloggers, are promoting the shows on the 2001 and 1916 attacks above. Where are the PR kits for shark conservation and education?

Knowing how diverse an ecological community is should be a simple matter. At the most basic level, we can go into the field take a sample and count the number of species. I know that when I look into my refrigerator that I have a beer diversity of 2. I have a few Guinness* and a few Duck-Rabbit Porter left over from last weekend.

Is this high diversity or low? Simply knowing the number of kinds of beer in my own refrigerator is not enough. I need comparison! The market down the street is chock-a-block of beer. For the sake of argument will say the market contains 50 kinds of beer and thus my house has low beer diversity in relation. Of course, on the other hand my house has greater beer diversity than the local preschool. At least I hope so!

The metric we just discussed is richness, i.e. what is the beer richness of my house, the supermarket, and the preschool. One of the most common metrics to quantify any ecological community is species richness, the number of species within a locality. The other important concept here is that there is more to diversity than just knowing that a locality has x number of species. It is important than some habitats possess more or less species as this yields information about the underlying ecological and evolutionary processes.

However, richness is just one part of the puzzle. What I didn’t tell is that I have 5 Guinness and 1 Duck-Rabbit Porters. Now just a few days ago, I had exactly 6 Guinness and 6 Duck-Rabbit Porters. So beer richness is unchanged, but diversity lowered. How? The second piece of the puzzle is evenness. Evenness is a measure of the equality or distribution of individuals, in our examples bottles, among species, here kinds of beer. In our example, I had 6 of each and thus high evenness before the weekend. After the weekend, beer diversity became uneven (5 and 1).

You can envision this in an ecological context as well. Two localities both have 5 species and 100 total individuals. But differ in how those species are distributed among species. At locality 1: 96, 1, 1, 1, 1 and locality 2: 20, 20, 20, 20.

Which of these two communities is more even? If you guessed 2 then you are correct! As aside here, evenness can be extremely informative.  For example, polluted localities are typically extremely uneven.

Ideally, we would want a way to quantify diversity that would account not only for how many species were at a location but how individuals were distributed through species. As you might guess, we have metrics that do this. At their core, all these metrics basically do something mathematically fancy with the fraction of individuals in each species and then sum all those.

The most prominent and widely used of these is the Shannon-Wiener Index (H’), or Shannon-Weaver Index**. pi here is simply the fraction of individuals in the ith species. So here, we have pi times the log of pi for each species then summed.

Of course we can also separate out evenness and measure this independently with a metric like Peilou’s J’*** (below labeled as E for evenness I presume). Where the H’ from Shannon-Wiener is divided by the maximum value H’ can take (totally equal numbers of individuals among species, S).

Of course this discussion focuses just on species, but we could just as easily quantify the diversity at other taxonomic levels, genus, family, order, class. We could also more ecologically meaningful groups such trophic types, guilds, and body size classes.

This will be an ongoing series with other topics including: morphological diversity; spatial scale and diversity; alpha-,beta-, and gamma-diversity, similarity in composition, genetic diversity, diversity in the deep sea, phlyogenetic diversity, taxonomic relatedness, etc. Feel free to suggest some topic below as well.

*is the plural of Guinness, Guinni?
**Quite an interesting story here. The index was originally developed by Claude Shannon in 1948. Norbert Weiner, who did not help develop this precise index, did lay out definitions and discussion of the relationship of information and entropy in the 1948 book “Cybernetics: or communication and control in the animal and the machine.” In a later book version of Shannon’s 1948 paper, Warren Weaver wrote the introduction spelling out these ideas for a lay audience. Thus, the two versions, Shannon-Weiner and Shannon-Weaver, probably resulted out of Weaver’s introduction and similarity of names. This confusion has largely gone away and almost any new student will learn of the Shannon-Weiner Index.
***Let’s here it for the women representing! Evelyn Christine Pielou (born February 20, 1924) is a statistical ecologist and an emeritus professor of mathematical ecology at University of Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada.

From the world famous “Dance Your Dissertation” contest, now on YouTube with a methods section. This video depicts a dissertation entitled “The invention and adoption of conservation technology to successfully reduce the bycatch of protected marine species” by Lekelia, using a mix of modern dance and watusi styles in the remarkable Sea Turtle Conservation Dance.

Click here to learn more.

Hervey Bay Whales 3938 courtesy of Michael Dawes on Flikr and available by CC Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 Generic (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/)

No matter what meaning I intend with the title, it has more than likely made you uncomfortable.  It makes me uncomfortable to write it. I do this as a sort of social and individual level experiment for both of us.

A stranded whale washes ashore.  What do you do?  One naturally tries to save it.  There is sort of unwritten code among us.  We should save animals…entire species from extinction and individuals from death.  We intervene both in part to help the animal and because it helps lower our guilt, makes us feel like we are actively participating in conservation, and selfishly makes us feel like better stewards.

But in Britain…

Of the 54 beachings of deep sea whales between 2002 and 2006, every rescue attempt failed.  Dr Paul Jepson, from the Zoological Society of London, said by the time the mammals reach our shores and estuaries they are severely dehydrated and have muscle damage that leads to kidney failure. The RSPCA [Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty for Animals] said rescue teams felt under “emotional pressure” to save whales. But added: “It is unlikely we will be rescuing in future.” From now on, beached whales will only be saved if they can be taken to sea within an hour. Experts said that is “highly unlikely” in the UK.

This makes one contemplate previous reactions to posts here, Diving With Sharks, and Southern Fried Scientist, on Sea Shepard.  Regardless of your opinion on the organization, Sea Shepard is able to mobilize and energize a certain contingent.  How important is the belief in action over real results, often hard to assess, among Sea Shepard and other NGO’s?  Is action alone enough or should we be accountable for producing results from action?