Category Archives: Environment

Day 101 10/4/13: Five Things I Learned at the Marine Mammal Center

by in Animal Welfare, Education, Environment, God, Marine Conservation and tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

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1. The pinnipeds arriving at the San Pedro rarely suffer from shark bites. The Center’s marine biologist, Chris Nagel has seen about three shark bites in five years. Most of these bites involve a stripping off of the skin. As I mentioned about a million blog posts ago, the Center treats shark bites (quite successfully) with special bacteria-free honey from South America and…duct tape.

2. The seals and sea-lion patients do suffer from marine mites, a variety of bacterial infections, and injuries inflicted by people. These include gunshots to the face, being tossed mackerel stuffed with dynamite and having their flippers hacked off by angry fishermen. Dead seals have also been found with algae-covered plastic water bottles in their guts. The most common ailment the animals suffer from–dehydration–is also indirectly, human-caused. Pinnipeds get their water from fish. Rising surface temperatures drive fish to the cooler depths. As the immature seals don’t know how to dive very deeply, they either can’t find fish, or depend on their mothers who must then go on deeper, and often longer hunts and don’t always return with food or return at all.

3. Anti-evolutionists often protest at the MMC. Even though they don’t believe in evolution, these activists express outrage that the Center “wastes” money to nurse sick and wounded animals back to health rather than “relying on natural selection.” I know, I know.

4. Some of the marine mammals that aren’t able to return to the wild, ” join” the Navy. The seals work for the military as search and rescue animals. They carry tools and identify foreign divers. Smart and cooperative, the slippery charmers are also highly social animals and rarely go AWOL. Porpoises however, are higher maintenance, and so often dubbed “The Lindsay Lohans” of the sea. The idea of drafting animals into military service makes me feel very weird.

5. Harbor seals, those spotted little darlings whose plush effigies populate aquarium gift shops everywhere, are actually really, really mean. Fur seals are also pretty cantankerous and are never returned to the ocean in popular swimming or surf spots, where they would likely bite people, but instead are transported about 40 miles out on the ocean before they’re set free.

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Day 94 9/27/13: In Praise of The Condemned

by in Environment, Memory | 4 Comments

I just noticed how dusty my bookshelves have become and this saddens me. Writing a blog while bemoaning the changes technology hath wrought, seems sort of hypocritical, but I guess what I am really bemoaning (if that’s the right word) is that my attention is so much more fractured than it used to be. I almost need to teach myself to read for sustained periods again. I find myself trying to download something, sign a petition, comment on a post, and I always forget what I am doing, where I am going. Several windows obscure my desktop. Tabs abound. Yet in my mind I see the same simple images: a blue road snaking into the woods where I grew up. A kind of automatic pilot mourning process that unfolds while I am busy typing and clicking and forgetting the myriad tasks and distractions of the present.

For weeks, I have been talking about doing more for sharks, for the environment and today I signed up for some lectures to learn more about using blogs and social media, so that is a step forward. I feel like I am on the verge of understanding how to combine literature, writing, activism, etc. into some sort of non-profit project. I talked to some man just as I was leaving campus today. We stood on the pedestrian bridge. Below workers and machines excavated a new construction project. He pointed out two native oaks–I believe they were 100 years old or more—that were condemned. Diseased. “It is sad, but they must come down.” I understand that trees get sick. I still dream of trees that perished from Dutch Elm and the salt damage from winter roads.

But as I gazed at the distant pair of elms waving slightly in the breeze near the duplication office, I wondered how any tree could really be condemned. And I thought of all the things those trees had seen. All the history that would die with them. After so many months of heat and stillness, I am alert to the breezes and to the wind and how they animate the trees and people alike. I don’t know what this has to do with taking classes on blogging, or with sharks except that sharks, I believe, are older than trees and that this project has sharpened my sense of all that is beautiful and all that’s vanishing and how intertwined those two things often are.

English: Dutch Elm Disease strikes Badingham O...

English: Dutch Elm Disease strikes Badingham One of our larger trees a couple of years after being struck down. Now (2008) hard to see where the tree was. (Photo credit: Wikipediat

Day 93: 9/26/13: Befriend a Bull Shark

by in Animal Welfare, Environment, Marine Conservation, Shark Charities, Shark Conservation | Leave a comment

Bull shark populations have declined up to 90% from finning pressures. You can donate as little as $10 and get various perks: a shout-out on  Twitter or FB,

Bull shark

Bull shark (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

a personalized certificate all the way up to an autographed vintage JAWS t-shirt.

Click here to adopt!

Day 87: 9/20/13: The Lemon Sharks of Jupiter

by in Activism, Animal Rights, Animal Welfare, Environment, Marine Conservation and tagged , | Leave a comment

You know what really pisses me off? When people use the word “harvest” to refer to hunting animals. As if bears were wheat or lemon sharks were lemons. Of course, “harvest” is only one of many really awful euphemisms like “animal research,” or “by-catch.”

Maybe the bigger question is why human beings seem hellbent on killing the things that are already disappearing?

For the vanishing lemon sharks of Jupiter Florida, the National Marine Fisheries Service has proposed that the new “harvest” date begin on January 1, 2014  just as the sharks are gathering to give birth to their pups.

Please read this post from Sharksavers and leave your comments for the NMFS asking them not to change the opening date of fishing season.

The comment period closes Monday, so please take action this weekend. It will only take 5 minutes or less!

English: Lemonshark

English: Lemonshark (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Day 84 9/17/13: Teaching Mammals to Love Fish

by in Animal Rights, Education, Environment, Shark Behavior | Leave a comment

A cavalcade of shark chores at school: plastering the joint with handsome sea-blue flyers advertising Ralph Collier’s lecture, xeroxing piles of articles,  realizing that not everyone is as utterly fascinated with all things shark as I am, although some students seem keen on learning more and one kind soul gave me a shark Pez dispenser.

I realize some of  this lack of interest in sharks is not just disguised fear, but disgust.  Sharks are fish. “Fish are gross,” one girl said. “They stink.” I thought of Jonathan Foer’s argument (I am too tired to reproduce it here) about fish being separated from us–living in the water they retain their otherness.

Another form of distance. Another barrier to overcome.

I described how beautiful the leopard sharks looked when I saw them in La Jolla, their spotted gold bodies rippling in the current. I gently suggested that our associations with smelly fish perhaps originated with the dead sea creatures laid out on slabs of ice in the market or languishing in filthy tanks.

I asked the class to write a few questions to ask Ralph Collier about shark behavior, attacks, etc.

A boy in the front row said, “I want to ask him if sharks have emotions.”

“Great question!” I exclaimed.

Although I felt too embarrassed to admit it, I’m still recovering from the crushing realization that this widely circulated shark-man love story was  a hoax.

Wood, iron nails, pigments

Day 74: 9/7/13: Save The Turtles (Feed the Sharks!)

by in Activism, Environment, Marine Conservation, Shark Charities | 2 Comments

A lovely day at Zuma Beach volunteering for Oceana at the Malibu triathlon. Last summer, I asked surprisingly willing triathlon swimmers to sign a petition to protect California’s great white shark population (ultimately the National Marine Fisheries declined despite the dwindling numbers). This year: loggerhead turtles. I had that same squishy uniquely human whose-side-am-I-on-anyway? feeling as I talked about the increased need for habitat for sea turtles, knowing that tiger sharks particularly love to feast on them.

Ultimately I realized that my position as a human isn’t necessarily  to root for one side, but to attempt to restore some part of the balance that humankind with its plastic, its miles of nets and hooks and acidified seas has destroyed. Nature, of course, is often brutal and so I’m moved when people fashion artificial flippers for a sea turtle crippled by sharks.

I know that human belief in our separateness from nature is the root of most of our problems. But my humanness will always make me feel like a distant admirer of animals, an apologist for my species, a loving outsider. As a kid, I wanted to be like Fern in “Charlotte’s Web,”–so much a part of the animal world that they “forgot” I was there and gossiped freely. Now, I don’t know if I seek a window into animals’ secret world  so much as I need an alternative to the crowded, relentlessly human one I inhabit.  Maybe it’s as simple as the epiphany I had a few weeks ago when admiring the crazed smile of a moray eel: “I like the other.”

A baby Loggerhead Sea Turtle

A baby Loggerhead Sea Turtle (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Eyewitness Account: White Shark Sighting!

by in Environment, Shark Behavior, Shark Sighting and tagged , , | Leave a comment

My friend Dana had the eerie luck of seeing a shark breach in Santa Cruz this summer:

From August 12-14th, I was camping at New Brighton State Beach just outside of Santa Cruz with my girlfriend, Valecia and my Portuguese Water Dog, Aesop.  The campsite is on the bluff overlooking the ocean, so in the morning of the 13th, we went to the beach and spent most of the day swimming.

It was a very active day at the beach.  There were people fishing and kayaking, and the ocean seemed active in general.  There were a few young seals in the water playing with a bunch of little kids.  The seals seemed to be very social and curious.  Since my dog likes to swim pretty far out, I remember thinking he looked (perhaps too much) like a baby seal.  Aesop is an expert dog swimmer, but next to the seals, I worried that from a shark’s point of view, he might appear like a sluggish baby seal who had drifted from the group, so I tried to stay close to him in the water.

Valecia went to get supplies from the campsite, and Aesop and I got out of the water.  I was looking at the ocean and suddenly everything seemed very calm.  The seals had all disappeared and the surface of the water appeared still and glassy.  Shortly after, large pelicans starting lining the shore.  There were so many of them, and they were so large, that they scared a few straggling swimmers out of the water.  I looked at the water and thought, “Of all the times I’ve stared at the ocean, it’s never seemed as still and creepy as right now.”  I had never noticed every animal disappear so suddenly before.

And then, I saw a great white shark breach the surface of the water.  His whole body ejected straight up into the air.  The shark wasn’t huge, but I definitely recognized that it was a great white.  He was probably about 9-12 feet long.  The sighting lasted only for a moment, and I was looking around to see if anyone else had seen it.  I was dying to confirm what I had seen because I had never seen anything like this in my entire life.

About 6-8 minutes after the sighting, the pelicans descended into the water en masse.  Shortly after that, all sorts of life returned to the ocean, particularly the scavenging birds.

-Dana Marterella

English: New Brighton State Beach near Santa C...

English: New Brighton State Beach near Santa Cruz, California View of public beach area near cliffs from stairs (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Day 71: 9/4/13: The Shark Sees My Soul & Finds It Lacking

by in Animal Welfare, Education, Environment, Marine Conservation | 1 Comment

Section 2 of my shark class met today. Instead of trying to decipher their stony expressions (anxiety, indifference?), I let them write a page describing how they felt about the ocean. One girl told me about her fisherman father who is legally blind and makes his own hooks. Although she is a vegetarian, she respects that her father only catches a fish or two at a time, because it’s better than factory farming. Oh the sheltered bliss of youth! While her father may catch only a poor hapless specimen or two, she has yet to discover the “factory farming of the sea” that is industrial fishing.

Sifting through the narratives of fear of drowning, fear of plankton, joyful memories of the dolphins of Anacapa, I found one student that took an overnight trip to SeaWorld with her seventh grade science honors class and dissected a squid there, another who tried to overcome her fear of sharks by standing in the “shark tunnel” at the aforementioned aqua prison, but confessed, “I didn’t last more than a few seconds without tears rolling down my face. I just can’t face them.” (emphasis mine).

Besides turning every single one of my students against SeaWorld, I look forward to exploring their fear more deeply.

“I just can’t face them,” seems to endow sharks with the power not only to kill, but to see inside the human soul and detect some moral failing there. I thought cats alone possessed this ability.

Day 63: 8/27/13: “A Fin in a Waste of Waters”

by in Environment, Literature, Memory, Shark Attack and tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Today’s title is  a recurring line  from Virginia Woolf’s novel “The Waves.”

That line mesmerized me when I wrote a paper on “The Waves”  for my Woolf seminar in graduate school.  I love the desolation of it–” a waste of waters,” and though I’ve not returned to that book in many years, it persists in my consciousness, a potent symbol, a perfect fragment.

However, High modernism is not the only source for memorable reminders of the power of the dorsal fin.

On September 25th, Ralph Collier, founder of  Shark Research Committee and author of the fascinating and disturbing book “Shark Attacks of the Twentieth Century”  will be my guest lecturer at Glendale College. I am a proud member of the Shark Research Committee and frequent reader of Pacific Coast Shark News,   Collier’s archives of detailed eyewitness descriptions of shark encounters (sightings, breachings,  bumped surfboards,  headless seals washed up on the beach or more rarely, full-fledged attacks) from California to Washington.

I could spend days scrolling through these accounts–which are both scientific and poetic, eerie and beautiful. A man diving near Refugio in Santa Barbara County  takes sanctuary in the kelp canopy after a 12-foot great white steals a freshly killed lingcod from his hand.  Two miles west of Refugio, a shark, “possibly a great white,” lifts a kayaker out of the water.  On a cloudless day in Big Sur, a two-foot high dorsal fin surfaces then disappears.

Phrases like “glassy calm” and “crescent-shaped bite” dazzle and terrify. Detailed, crime report-style identifications:  “blunt nose, 12-14 feet in length, grayish black” alternate with the ephemeral, and elusive:   “the shadow of the body was about 15-feet in length.”

These encounters, these observations are usually over in seconds.

The shark moves lazily or with the precision and speed of a torpedo, over the reef, out to sea. Or simply sinks and disappears.

Français : Aileron de requin. English : Shark ...

Français : Aileron de requin. English : Shark dorsal fin. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)