Category: Marine Animals

Artful Dodge gets Agudo family out of Venezuela

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 1996:

GLENCOE, Missouri––Wanted for treason by Venezuela, because in February
1993 he and colleague Aldemaro Romero videotaped fishers in the act of killing a dolphin,
Professor Ignacio Agudo is safe in Brazil, after two years on the run. His daughters Esther,
seven, and Lina, 15 months, are with him.
Romero too is alive and well, having escaped to Miami in February 1994. His wife
followed soon after. But Agudo’s wife Saida, Esther and Lina’s mother, died in hiding on
April 26, 1995, at age 36, because she couldn’t get medication she needed for a chronic
heart condition. Their grandfather, Agudo’s father, repeatedly interrogated by Venezuelan
police, shot himself in December 1994, to avoid giving away their location.

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Monk seals imperiled by near-war in Aegean

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 1996:

ISTANBUL––As a game of capture-theflag
among youths on the rocky islands between
Greece and Turkey escalated from taunts to trouble in
late January, Turkish Mediterranean monk seal expert
Bayram Ozturk of the Istanbul University faculty of
fisheries apparently tried to pour oil on the troubled
waters, but only stoked the conflagration, which was
eventually stopped only through the personal intercession
of U.S. President Bill Clinton.
Said Ozturk on January 31 via the MARMAM
online bulletin board, “The Mediterranean
monk seal population in Turkey is no longer stable,”
something of an understatement. “The most recent
census, made last year, found 47 individuals. On
the Bodram Peninsula, only six individuals including
pups are living in the small islands called Cavus,
Iremit, and Kardak. Since 1991, the Monk Seal
Protection Project has been conducted in these islets
on behalf of the Turkish Ministry of the Environment
by Istanbul University. Unfortunately,” Ozturk continued,
“Kardak got occupied by Greek soldiers.

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Clinton not expected to stand up to Japanese whalers

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 1996:

WASHINGTON D.C.––At the ANIMAL PEOPLE deadline, President Bill Clinton
was imminently expected to send a message to Congress about Japanese whaling, responding to
a December advisory from the Department of Commerce that Japan was vulnerable to trade sanctions
because of its decision to kill minke whales within the Southern Oceans Whale Sanctuary.
But Clinton was not expected to impose sanctions.
Argued Senator John Kerry (D-Mass.) in a February 7 letter to Clinton, “At this point,
any efforts short of sanctions would signal a lack of commitment to whale conservation by the
United States.” Japan officially moved into compliance with the 1986 global moratorium on
commercial whaling in 1988, but has continued to conduct gradually escalating hunts of minke
whales for “scientific research.”

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Marine mammals

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 1996:

Nets and dolphins

EDINBOROUGH––The Royal
SPCA and World Wide Fund for Nature
head a nine-group coalition protesting a proposal
by Scots Office Minister Raymond
Robertson to make Scots fishers more competitive
by lifting a ban on the use of
monofilament gil nets which might drown
harbor porpoises. Such nets are used in the
waters of other European nations.
Eleven dolphins apparently
drowned in fishing nets washed up in
Cornwall between January 4 and January 11,
prompting Cornwall Wildlife Trust chair
Nick Tregenza to apply to the European
Commission for funds with which to develop
an alarm to warn dolphins away from
nets. The EC is already funding a similar
project called CETASEL, formed under the
1994 Agreement on the Conservation of
Small Cetaceans of the Baltic and North
Seas, a.k.a. ASCOBANS. “The project
started in the beginning of 1995, and the
first sea trials were carried out in March
1995,” said CETASEL coordinator Dick de
Haan. “The first enclosure trial, on a
stranded harbor porpoise, showed the animals’
sensitivity to ‘chirp and sweep’
sounds. In 1996 two sea trials are planned
off the southwestern coast of Ireland.”
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Sea Shepherds want to herd Hondo

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 1996:

SEATTLE––Hondo, the California sea lion
who ambushes salmon and steelhead at the base of the
Ballard Locks near Seattle, was back for the start of
this winter’s spawning runs, with others, and when
the National Marine Fisheries Service said it had no
money to capture and hold him throughout the spawning
season, as it did last year, at cost of $120,000,
shooting seemed imminent. But on January 25 the Sea
Shepherd Conservation Society put the killing on hold
by formally proposing to relocate Hondo and friends to
San Francisco Bay.
“Sea Shepherd has offered to pay this year’s
costs of temporary housing and immediate translocation
of sea lions to California,” said Sea Shepherd
Pacific Northwest coordinator Michael Kundu. “We
have legal permission from the San Francisco Bay
Commission to return these sea lions to California,”
their native waters.

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The price of Willy

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 1996:

NEWPORT, Oregon––Keiko, the orca star of the
1993 film Free Willy!, was already the costliest, most controversial
whale in history long before he splashed into his
new surroundings, a $7 million state-of-the-art tank at the
Oregon Coast Aquarium. Enjoying four times the space he
had in his 11 years at the El Reino Aventura amusement park
in Mexico City, Keiko increased his activity so much as to
double his appetite within his first week of arrival, as the
biggest package ever flown by United Parcel Service.
But the successful relocation only escalated the
debate over whether and if Keiko can––or should––actually
be freed. Moving him was the easy part. There were disagreements
over who should move him, where, for what
purpose, but even El Reino Aventura general manager Oscar
Porter readily agreed in principle that he needed better quarters.

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Marine Animals

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 1996:

Cetaceans

Captain Paul Watson honors
Captain James Waddell, commander of the
Confederate warship Shenandoah, in the
3rd/4th Quarter 1995 edition of The Sea
Shepherd Log. Waddell in 1865 sank 38 of
the 85 Yankee whalers in the North
Pacific––fighting on for seven months after
the Confederacy surrendered––without either
taking or losing a human life. His official
goal was doing economic harm to the Union,
but crewman Joshua Minor told one whaling
captain, “We have entered into a treaty
offensive and defensive with the whales. We
are up here by special agreement to disperse
their mortal enemies.” Watson credits
Waddell and crew with preventing the extinction
of bowheads and grey whales.

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Dolphin-safe may be on borrowed time

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 1996:

WASHINGTON D.C.––Motion to implement
the October 4 Declaration of Panama, rolling back U.S.
dolphin-safe tuna standards, commenced with the
November 29 introduction of S 1420, the International
Dolphin Conservation Program Act, by Senators Ted
Stevens and Frank Murkowski (both R-Alaska) and John
Breaux (D-Louisiana).
Favored by the Clinton administration, S 1420
would replace the U.S. ban on imports of tuna netted on
dolphin with a rule allowing the import of tuna caught on
dolphin if no dolphin deaths were seen during the operation,
and would allow the incidental deaths of 5,000 dolphins
a year. The Declaration was signed by all the major
Pacific tuna-fishing nations, and was endorsed by the
Center for Marine Conservation, Environmental Defense
Fund, Greenpeace, the National Wildlife Federation, and
the World Wildlife Fund, all of which favor “sustainable
use” wildlife management.

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Marine mammals in captivity

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 1996:

A year after ANIMAL PEOPLE reader Janice
Garnett, of Venice, Florida, asked us to look into the
plight of two dispirited Pacific whitesided dolphins at the
Steinhart Aquarium in San Francisco, the dolphins were
flown to Sea World San Antonio in November to join the
biggest pod of their species in captivity, at the facility considered
the state-of-the-art for keeping whales and dolphins.
ANIMAL PEOPLE passed Garnett’s letter to San Francisco
SPCA ethical studies coordinator Pam Rockwell, who
learned that the dolphins, named Amphrite and Thetis, had
been in a tank only 25% of the legal minimum size since
1975 and 1978, respectively, sharing the space with four
harbor seals whom local stranding rescuers judged unsuitable
for return to the wild. The California Academy of the
Sciences, operators of the Steinhart, had special dispensation
from the National Marine Fisheries Service and USDA to
keep the dolphins, in part because they had remained healthy
for longer than any other whitesided dolphins ever captured.

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