Great White Sharks

White Shark attacks keep increasing
And calls for a cull are unceasing
Despite greater surveillance and policing
And stocks of White Sharks decreasing

These calls for a cull are delusion
And improved shark safety illusion
It’s a media driven conclusion
That is creating public confusion

Understanding our shark interaction
Is key before we take action
And avoids a mindless reaction
That will not get shark safety traction

The recent decision by the WA Barnett Government to allow the culling of White Sharks is appalling. It is political expediency at its worst. There is absolutely no doubt that it was a decision taken against the advice of his own scientific departments. It’s about public appeasement and being seen to be doing something about the unprecedented number of fatal shark attacks in Western Australia in the past couple of years. And while the premise that human life must take precedence over that of a shark will strike a chord with a large proportion of the voting public it will do little if nothing to reduce the risk of a shark attack. Great White Shark attacks invariably occur on solitary surfers and divers and not on crowded Perth beaches. Culling White Sharks will not change this and at worst will give people a false sense of security. The key point is that White Sharks are a vulnerable protected migratory species. They are also an apex predator critical to the health of the marine ecosystem. If Australia ignores its commitments under the numerous international treaties designed to protect endangered species then it will have no credibility in international forums. Our call on Japan to stop whaling in the Antarctic Whale Sanctuary for example will smack of hypocrisy. Australia is a world eco-power with control over large areas of the world’s oceans. We should be a leader in marine research and conservation but we are quickly sliding down the scale. The current trend of slashing funding to science and research and ignoring scientific advice at both federal and state level is deeply disturbing. If the Barnett Government was truly committed to reducing the risk of shark attacks it would be funding research programmes to understand why it is that shark attacks are increasing at the same time that the population of Great White Sharks is falling. Understanding this will help us understand what we must do to reduce the risk of a shark attack. We must also keep things in context. The risk of a shark attack is miniscule to that of drowning and of course to being killed on the road. The analogy with road fatalities is very apt. No one suggests that culling cars will improve road safety. It is all about driver behaviour and understanding the risks. There are interestingly more road fatalities in country areas with less cars. It is exactly the same with sharks.

Abalone Dreaming

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Coastal life is the life for me

With beach and surf and clear blue sea

Where I can fish with my family

And dive the reef for abalone

 

Our lovely city by the sea

Has so far kept its harmony

With a well managing fishery

And foraging still largely free

 

The Ocean Reef Marina

Needs a second thought

With a million abalone

Soon all gone for nought

 

 It’s almost a truism that every development will be opposed by a special interest group.  But ultimately effective consultation, good-will and a capacity to compromise will secure a balanced outcome that serves the common good.  The important thing is that the process is open and transparent and that the decision makers are well informed.  Where things become murky is when key information is deliberately withheld in order to secure a favourable outcome for the proponent. The word for this is “spin” and a classic example is the proposed ocean reef marina that is being heavily promoted by the Joondalup City Council. The information presented on the council website is impressive (http://www.joondalup.wa.gov.au/develop/majorprojects/oceanreefmarina.aspx ). Impacts on the feeding grounds of the endangered Carnaby’s White-Tailed Black Cockatoo and the endangered Graceful Sun Moth have been well studied and community consultation has been extensive.  There is apparently overwhelming community support for the Project.  The key question though is why impacts on abalone are not mentioned.  The proposed Ocean Reef Marina will take out about 10 ha of the best abalone habitat in the Perth coastal zone. There is literally a carpet of abalone on the offshore reef that will be removed to make way for the marina. The abalone fishery is well managed and Fisheries Officers are quick to hammer anyone who takes more than their 20 daily bag limit or any undersize animals during their five by one hour allowed fishing sessions each year.  How can this be reconciled with the loss of possibly one million abalone from the recreational fishery?  Imagine the outrage towards an individual who harvested 50 tonnes of abalone out of a tightly controlled fishery and then consider that not only is the council proposing to do exactly that but to also permanently remove the habitat.  There is no shortage of sandy habitat to build a marina. It is simply not necessary to destroy precious rocky reef in the Marmion Marine Park to build the marina. It beggars belief that the Council is unaware that the marina will take out a large area of prime abalone habitat.  Their strategy of not mentioning it as an issue smacks of deliberate misrepresentation. It has to be tabled as a key concern. In the words of Virgil Kane: “You take what you need and leave the rest but they should never have taken the very best”.

Evolutionary Harmony

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Species evolution

Through survival of the fit

Was first proposed by Darwin

But such thoughts have changed a bit   

Individual adaptation

Is just one part of it

There is also exaptation

And inter-species fit  

Genetics is quite complex

With genes the building blocks

That may dominate or recess

And at times switch on and off

Darwin’s “On the origin of species by means of natural selection” is a remarkable work made even more so by its publication before the discovery of genetics.  Whilst the basic theory has stood the test of time it should be viewed as a foundation work for evolutionary studies and not as a “holy book” for evolutionary biologists.  Its main potential issue is that it presents a depressingly bleak view of a dog eat dog world similar to Tennyson's “nature red in tooth and claw”.  The deeply compassionate and gentle Darwin would have been horrified to see his theory used to justify the extremist views of white supremacists including the Nazi’s. The strong shall prevail!  In practice “survival of the fittest” means much more than being the best competitor. Species can and do support each other and whilst every species must eat there is also great harmony and interdependence in the web of life.  The struggle to survive is always there but the day to day lives of most species are happy and contented. At its extreme you end up with an interdependent living planet or Gaia as presented so brilliantly by Tim Flannery in his book , “Country”.

I like the concept of exaptation where a particular advantageous trait becomes a foundation for further adaptations such as birds first developing feathers to keep them warm and then finding they are useful for flight. This solves many directional evolution puzzles.

Perhaps the most fascinating concept of all is that of co-evolution.  There are many examples of birds and insect pollinators co-adapted with specific flowers but it can be more subtle that. My all time favourite book is David Paxton's “Why it’s OK to talk to your dog”. It presents a compelling case on the co-evolution of dogs and people which ultimately gave humans the edge over our Neandertal competitors. Modern man in partnership with the dog could afford to forgo an acute sense of smell and hearing in return for greater thought and speech capacity.

The Kraken Wakes

  Photo is a diver dwarfed by a giant jellyfish.
Credit: Yomiuri Shimbun from:
 http://www.livescience.com/13112-giant-jellyfish-blooms-ria.html

Before the Age of Fishes
The acid seas were warm
And filled with slimy jellies
In an endless pulsing swarm

But much carbon was sequestered
And the seas began to cool
And teams of bony fishes
Began to swim and school

Our seas are turning acid
And becoming very warm
And the ancient slimy monsters
Once more begin to swarm

I recently saw a frightening programme on Giant Jellyfish infestations in the Sea of Japan. Billions of giant Nomura Jellyfish weighing up to 200kg are choking the Sea of Japan and have destroyed the fishing industry. Similar events are occurring in the Gulf of Mexico, China's Yellow Sea and in the Black Sea. Overfishing, pollution from fertilisers and global warming have all been implicated but there is no doubt that the ancient jelly-fish which dominated the worlds oceans 300 million years ago are much better at coping with warm, acidic and low oxygen conditions than modern fish. Fisheries are collapsing everywhere and wild ocean fish stocks are now perhaps 10% of what they once were. We are in the process of turning back the clock 300 million years and unless we change our ways quickly we will be truly damned. Scientists are struggling to understand this latest catastrophe but my time as a salt field ecologist has given me an inkling as to what may be going on. I suspect that the balance between benthic and planktonic ecosystems has been disrupted as a consequence of pollution from fertilisers, pH drop from increased dissolution of CO2 and, general ocean warming. Weed-eating fish in the early ponds of a salt-field graze the seaweeds and deposit nutrient in waste onto the floor of the ponds where it is bound up in the mud. The continually grazed seaweeds regrow taking nutrient out of the water column and helping to secure clear water with big populations of fish and carpets of sea-weed. When a catastrophe killed the fish, excess nutrient ended up in the water column where it promoted blooms of phytoplankton and the once clear and fish filled water became a fish-less, soupy mess similar to what has happened in the sea of Japan.

Our chook-house girt by sea

The birds within the chook-house
Out there on the farm
Rely upon their keepers
To keep them safe from harm

One break in the defences
Lets a fox into the run
To slaughter all the chickens
While yipping loud his fun

The stewards of Australia
In the eighteenth century
Saw fit to release foxes
Into our chook-house girt by sea

A fox broke into our poultry run a couple of weeks ago slaughtering 5 pea-fowl, 4 guinea fowl and 3 chooks. The mess of blood, feathers and dead birds was horrifying and particularly because these were tame birds. They were our pets who were relying on us to keep them safe from harm. We had failed in our stewardship but its a familiar story repeated nightly across Australia. The fox is clever and persistent and once it breaches the defences it will ruthlessly slaughter everything within. But with sufficiently robust fencing, an electric hot wire and  constant surveillance it is possible to keep them out. Most of the time!

But what if there is no fence, no electric hot wire and no steward on guard? We know the answer because this is the situation across most of Australia. The native birds and small mammals have no chance and the fox, as it does in a chook pen, keeps killing until there is nothing left alive. The only salvation for much our wildlife is that their populations eventually fall so low that the foxes start to starve. In National Parks and other areas it is constant battle with baits and traps and guns and slowly but surely the fox is winning.

And what kind of a monster thought it was a good idea to introduce foxes into Australia? The fine upright British citizen who enjoyed fox hunting and was home-sick for merry England would likely have never given the consequences a second thought. It is also probable that if he had been told the consequences he would have gone right ahead and introduced them anyway. The sad truth of the matter is that the 19th Century Australian settler does not have a monopoly on arrogance, complacency and thoughtlessness. Will someone 100 years from now dealing with the consequences of our bad choices look back in astonishment and wonder what kind of selfish monsters inhabited Australia in the early 21st Century. How can we be better stewards of our country and our planet?








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Chuditch

In the 1800s
When the English settlers came
The chicken eating Chuditch
Was wiped out on the plain

In the 1900s
The fox  joined in the game
Wiping out the Chuditch
In the Darling Range

The few remaining Chuditch
Continue to be shot
As they raid the chicken coups
And we will soon have lost the lot

Everyone knows about the Tasmanian Tiger and wonders at the breathtaking ignorance that lead to its extinction.  How could we have lost such an iconic treasure and what kind of monsters were these Tasmanian settlers who shot it to extinction?  We are comforted in the knowledge that we are now no longer so profoundly ignorant. We appreciate our natural treasures and such crimes against nature would not be tolerated in modern Australia.  If we think that we are truly deluded. We have learned nothing or at least very little. Yes there are many who care deeply about wildlife conservation and such people will also have been around when the last Tasmanian Tiger died in Hobart Zoo in 1933. But unfortunately there are many more, and likely the majority, who could not care less.

The Chuditch or Western Quoll is Western Australia’s largest marsupial carnivore and like its cousin the Tasmanian Tiger has been hunted to the edge of extinction. And while many of us are absolutely thrilled when we catch of rare glimpse of this rapidly vanishing treasure others are not so happy. There are some who will spend hours hunting them down following a raid on the chook yard. And for what? How hard is it at the end of the day to construct a secure chook pen?  In my view we should lock up anyone who shoots an endangered animal and throw away the key. But these people do not see themselves as criminals, just battling farmers, and most of the community also sees it that way. That of course is the heart of the problem. How else would the Shooters and Fishers Party have secured a seat in Western Australia’s upper house in the recent election?

And as well as hunters the Chuditch has to contend with the fox and fox eradication is not a current priority. In recent years with lax baiting programmes fox numbers are on the increase across Western Australia and with them many species like Woylies, Numbats and Chuditch, that had been returned from the brink of extinction are once more in decline.

Feral foxes in Australia

From tame English forest
Outfoxed by the hounds
The captive is shipped
Off to far southern bounds

In wild Aussie bushland
He hides from the hounds
And preys on the rabbit
That newly abounds

He soon finds a mate
And extinction he brings
To the wildlife estate
Where he is now feral king

Riding to the hounds was very popular among the rich and famous in England in the first half of the 19^th century. Fox hounds, originally developed in the 16^th Century by crossing grey-hounds, fox-terriers and bulldogs, became very common and they made their way to the colonies with the hunt-mad Anglophile colonists.

Fox hunting was an integral part of colonial social status and wealthy colonists invariably had their stable of well bred horses and packs of fox-hounds to go with their fine clothes, large houses and teams of servants. In the early days the Australian colonists had to make do with kangaroos, dingoes and the occasional “bag-fox” imported directly from England whilst they tried their hardest to establish the fox in Australia. There is documented evidence of foxes being introduced into Van Dieman’s Land in 1833 and into the Port Phillip District of NSW (now Victoria) in 1845. The Governor of NSW, Sir Charles Fitzroy, who was the Master of the Sydney Hunt, received two dog foxes from England in 1855 and soon released one:

After being given just a few days to recover from their long sea voyage; one fox was released from a cage at Randwick Heights. Bewildered at first release the imported fox “crouched and crawled forward slowly, looking about him….he raised himself suddenly and made for thick scrub. The hounds were all in leash and the horsemen stationed on a knoll a little way off. The fox kept to a ridge past Maroubra Bay and then turned inland into more open country. He came out on a large open plain and tried to turn back, but the hounds met him and tore him to pieces.

It appears that none of the early importations were successful in establishing the fox in Australia. That didn’t happen until 1871 when a local physician and “acclimatisation” advocate from Ballarat, Dr. King, released a dog fox and two vixens 12 miles west of Ballarat. At about the same time Thomas Chernside released “several foxes” on his 90,000 acre Werribee Park Estate at Point Cook near Melbourne. By this time rabbits had become well established in the area and with this new and abundant food source foxes quickly become established. Wild foxes were sighted near Ballarat in 1874, Laverton in 1878, Corio Bay in 1880 and Bendigo in 1886. By 1990 they had colonised 13,000 square kilometres of Victoria and had become a significant agricultural pest. They followed the rabbit across the Nullarbor and were first sighted at Kalgoorlie in 1917. So it was ultimately all about timing. The newly established rabbit population was expanding rapidly at just the right time to provide sufficient food to establish the fox which also preyed on native species.

Foxes today occupy the whole of sub-tropical Australia and number about 7.2 million animals. They consume an estimated 190 million native birds a year and are the single greatest agent of mammal extinction in Australia with Woylies, Numbats, Bandicoots and other small marsupials being particulalry vulnerable. Tasmania fortunately remains fox free despite many introduction attempts. This is probably due to the presence of the Tasmanian Devil and its ability to eat fox cubs. In recent times, in an act of almost incomprehensible environmental vandalism, there has been a further fox introduction into Tasmania. This time with Devils on the wane due to the facial tumour disease they may get a foothold despite attempts to eradicate them.

Many thanks to http://tasmaniantimes.com/index.php/article/hunting-foxes which presents a detailed history of fox introduction into Australia.