Fishing industry starving whales of food
By Samantha Hayes
Sun, 20 Jun 2010 6:00p.m.
A marine biologist says he’s discovered a new threat to whales that has nothing to do with Japanese boats. Steve O’Shea studies beached whales in New Zealand and believes the fishing industry is starving them of their food supply. Twenty-one pilot whales have beached themselves at Aotea Harbour, near Raglan; by the time they were discovered on the remote beach, it was too late. “It’s been dead for about 3-4 day’s I’d say, and it’s beginning to bloat but looking at it, it’s very thin,” Steve O’Shea said. Mr O’Shea has been studying beached whales for seven years and their food source, squid, for 20 – and he doesn’t like what he’s seeing. Around 10,000 whales have died on New Zealand beaches in the last 30 years. Research by marine biologist Steve O’Shea shows many of these whales now beaching are in such a poor state of health he believes they may be starving. “We’re exploring the possibility that these animals are hungry, are both hungry and thirsty in fact, because they get all of their food and their water from squid and if you take the squid out of the food chain there’s obviously going to be cascading effects,” he says. Mr O’Shea’s team will take samples from the dead whales’ stomachs; almost 100 percent of the whales they’ve studied so far have had ulcers. “Now you get ulcers through smoking, drinking and bad diet – that’s basically it. These animals have got incredibly ulcerated stomachs,” he says of the beached whales. The young pilot whales at Raglan have worn teeth, a sure sign they’re eating the wrong food – in their case that’s anything other than squid. On average 38,000 tonnes of squid are caught in New Zealand waters every year; the Ministry of Fisheries is happy with a quota three times higher than that. “The Ministry sets sustainable catch limits for squid, limits haven’t been reached,” says Aoife Martin, manager of Deep Water Fisheries. But Mr O’Shea questions its ecological sustainability and has given up eating seafood. The Department of Conservation and local iwi plan to let the pilot whales decompose naturally on the beach – a reminder perhaps that something could be very wrong in our oceans.
