Friday August 29, 2003 at 2:51 PM
Of Minke's, Toothfish & Predation
Appearing in The Environment
In a Reuters story published earlier today, Siv Fridleifsdottir, Iceland’s Environment Minister expressed frustration over the intense wave of criticism prompted by Iceland’s decision to slaughter 38 minke whales. Reiterating her position that the sacrifice was a necessary means to understanding the whale’s impact on Iceland’s fishing stocks, Fridleifsdottir also commented that many critics falsely believed the minke was an endangered species.
While Ms. Fridleifsdottir is undoubtedly frustrated by the reaction to the Icelandic action, the implications of the statement are particularly disturbing. By her logic, the acceptability of killing an animal, regardless of the animal’s intelligence or suffering, is solely dependent on the relative abundance of the species. In other words, it’s perfectly acceptable to kill any non-human species — tigers, cheetahs, pandas, gorillas, chimpanzees, rhinoceroses, and elephants included — so long as the survival of the species isn’t threatened.
While such a position is clearly suspect on purely moral terms, it also belies a level of scientific and pragmatic ignorance ill-befitting someone in her post.
The reality of commercial predation is that regulations are rarely established until a local population has crashed or the entire species is nearing extinction. By that point however, the reduction in the species’ ecological impact has had repercussions for the entire ecosystem. For example, recent DNA studies show that historical whale populations were two to three times larger than previously thought. In addition to the obvious impact human predation has had on whale populations, the researchers also state that the loss of whales has resulted in large-scale and poorly understood changes to shark and fish populations throughout the oceanic ecosystems.
The unfortunate paradox is that while a species’ ecological value is proportional to the size of its population, the inverse is true of its economic value. As a result, once a species approaches extinction, there is increasing economic incentive for further exploitation.
For example, although the 1,000 pandas remaining in the wild are of little ecological consequence, the 120 pandas living in zoos [ source ] have tremendous economic significance, typically generating $1 million per year for the institutions fortunate enough to house them.
A similar example played out in the Antarctic Ocean this week when an international coalition headed by Australian and South African officials successfully captured the fishing vessel Viarsa with over 150 tons of Patagonian toothfish on board [ see also ]. More commonly known as Chilean seabass, the fish is a relative newcomer to the world of commercial exploitation. Unfortunately, the confluence of affluent dining habits, sophisticated fishing technology, and a slow reproduction cycle has quickly led the animal to near-extinction. An unfortunate result of it’s rarity however, has been an increase in its economic value. The retail value of one shipload of the fish is close to $2 million.
The great irony of these examples is that on the one hand we have a government official claiming it’s acceptable to hunt a species of whale because it’s abundant while on the other hand we have a fishing captain economically encouraged to exploit a species of fish because it is rare. Combined, we are left with The Tragedy of the Commons writ large.
* Visit the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch for more information on ecologically sensitive seafood choices.
