We just returned from 6 days on the Rio Parana in northern Argentina where we stayed at the home of Peto Nogare in Itati (see green placemark on map below). The river is the border between Paraguay and Argentina, home to dense jungles along the banks, massive estancia rice plantations further inland and a drug smuggler’s dream world. The Rio Parana is also home to Argentina’s national fish – the Golden Dorado – and home to several large freshwater fish: pacu, surubi, boga, armando and pirapita.  The purpose of our trip was very simple: document the status of this majestic native fish and the Argentine effort to protect the dorado from overfishing and illegal poaching/smuggling by both Paraguayan and Argentine fishermen.

Our story begins in Corrientes after a 11 hour overnight bus ride from Buenos Aires. Corrientes is a town of 100,000 people and a major fishermen destination for both Argentines and Brazilians to pursue the golden dorado.  Many years ago, large dorado up to 25 kilos were caught but today after decades of overfishing by recreational, commercial and poachers have decimated the population. We visited two fish markets to find out who supplies their fresh fish and if they can purchase dorado for us. When we arrived at Pescaderia Jonathan, we found an empty but upscale fish market with multiple freezers holding many fish but no dorado.

The commercial fisherman who supplies the fish market was it the store and we asked him about his business.  He uses a 200 meter long by 2 meter high gill net that he sweeps the river bottom for fish catching and keep everything he catches. He does catch and keep dorado because there is always a market for it – especially in Paraguay who will buy dorado for 15 pesos/kilogram.  It is illegal to sell dorado in Argentina but not in Paraguay and there are plenty of Brazilian buyers of all fish.

We left Corrientes with our guide Peto Nogare to explore the Rio Parana by boat.   But first a few pictures showing the wealth extraction machine along the river.

Water pumping station for massive rice plantations operated by the family estancias along the river

Our guide Peto and his famed Suzuki jeep

Golden Dorado catch and release poster in the Corrientes bus station. First time I have ever seen an ad like this to promote protecting the species.

Longline fisherman checking his hooks in the Rio Parana.  The green liter bottle holds corn which is used as a bait scent to attract fish to the baited hooks.

Sunset in the town of Yahape on the banks of the Rio Parana.  The boat is a knockoff of the famed Carolina skiff complete with flat bottom, bumpy ride and shallow draft.

More later. Peace. JTM

Midway Reel from Marine Ventures Foundation on Vimeo.

Back from Midway Atoll now.  These immersive experiences are always intense but wonderful.  Since it was my second trip to Midway, I was prepared for most of what we saw – 500,000 albatross, 25 endangered monk seals, endangered Laysan ducks and slowing crumbling infrastructure from 40 years of Navy presence on the Atoll.   But what surprised me what the frustration and anger I felt toward the government agencies that manage the place.   Sure Bush signed the northwest Hawaiian Islands into monument status.  And yes he gave management responsibility to three groups:  US Fish and Wildlife Service, NOAA and the state of Hawaii.  And yes these three groups have different agendas, different management styles and different political views.  Was not smart on Bush’s part.   He took the easy way out and now we pay for that.  It is hard enough to fix a broken system, almost impossible for three groups to agree on what and how to do it.

Midway is a story about restoration of a wild place by ordinary people.  It first served a critical role in WWII that every one respects and understands the sacrifice by American troops.  But the real story about Midway is so what happens next? How do humans rebuild a damaged ecosystem both on land and in the sea?  How much do they do? When do they stop?  Evidence of that struggle was really apparent this year.  Monk seal populations continue to decline and there is some evidence that sharks are eating the pups threatening the entire seal population. So what are the management options? Let the seals get eaten? Move the seals to another island?  Shoot the sharks?  And if we do any of these options for 1 year then do we do them the next year and the next year?  Do we shoot all the sharks or just a few?  Would we just trap the seals and take them to California to live where most predators are already gone from the ecosystem?  We could take them to the Caribbean but wait – Caribbean monk seals are already extinct.  There is no line in the sand of where we humans should stop interfering with natural processes when we have the best intentions to fix what we broke.

And the Midway example can be carried to some of the MVF projects here in the US like the Henrys Fork Caldera Project.  Do we kill off the swans to protect trout habitat?  Do we do major river flow modifications to attempt to improve the habitat?  I mean we humans did dam the river and have managed water flows for decades for farmers benefit not swans or trout.  Do we change that? Do we let the river take it s course (managed by human demand for irrigation waters) and just get what we get on the fish?   What are the priorities?  Do trout and swans get a vote on what happens to where they live?

I learned in Midway one simple thing: once an ecosystem has been damaged by human presence, it is almost impossible to return it to its natural functioning state thru some restoration process.  And that we, the taxpayers, will have to keep paying year after year to keep fixing/modifying/replacing parts of the habitat in order for the creatures to continue to live there.   The scientists and conservationist are working hard to do the right thing.  They just do not know what the right thing to do is…   This is not sustainable.

The growing mission of Marine Ventures to document and baseline functioning ecosystems is more important today than it was 2 weeks ago.  Midway showed me that unless we stop damaging ecosystems with ill-advised development or poorly designed restoration plans that we will destroy the places we love forever.  We have to work smarter with better planning and assessment in order to avoid doing more damage.

I am posting some of the many photos taken on Midway in the past 4 days.  We have been engaged in three areas:  albatross conservation, Hawaiian monk seal counts and marine debris cleanup. See what you think.

Tracy getting up close to ID a monk seal on West Beach.  Most monk seals are tagged but they use body scars as a second way to track the animals.

Duke team removing a trawl net off the beach.  This one took 5 people to carry out to the recycling center.

Juvenile monk seal with ID K26 on its back.  NOAA scientist use Clairol hair bleach to mark the seals.  This animal has been bitten by a shark – see the tooth incision marks on its side below the K26.

Dragging a large rope to the recycling center.   Midway receives over 20 tons of marine debris a year.   8 tons wash up on the beach.  An additional 8.6 tons are fishing gear and nets that wash onto the coral reefs surrounding the Atoll and a whopping  4.5 tons of plastic are brought to the Atoll by the Albatross.

Being 1200 miles from Honolulu means all food arrives on a barge 4 times a year except for fresh vegetables which are grown in a hydroponic garden.  The garden produces 200 lbs a week that are consumed by the 70 residents on the island.

Finally, Midway Atoll was a major navy base during WWII and the scene of the turning point in the war.  After shelling the island on December 7, 1941, the Japanese returned in June 1942 to subdue the island.  In a battle lasting 3 days, the US sank 3 Japanese carriers and inflicted heavy damage on the fourth.  The PBY (long range float planes) hangar is still standing on Midway and still bears the scars of that battle.  Since the war ended and the Navy left Midway in the late 1980s, the struggle to return the island to its former natural state has been ongoing.  The albatross population is thriving, the monk seals declining and the endangered Laysan duck has made a remarkable recovery.   Human intervention in a natrual ecosystem seems justified given Midway’s historic role in the history of the US.

I will try to talk more about a few more topics this coming week: longlining, human intervention to protect endangered species and the role of innovation in conservation projects.   Peace.

MIdway Atoll is 1200 miles NW of Honolulu, HI. Part of the new Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument, Midway atoll is composed of three islands, the largest being 1100 acre in size, famous for the critical battle in WWI, home to over 1,000,000 albatross and my home for 10 days this month.  I am here with a Duke School of the Environment class with professors Andy Read and Dave Johnston.  The class is one of the many immersive courses offered by Duke for masters students: incredible place to learn, awesome profs and a chance to experience a major restoration project first hand.  And Laysan Albatross are incredible birds. With a wingspan of 8 ft, they go to sea for weeks at a time and travel up to 3,000 miles per trip feeding in the open ocean.  Their cousins and MIdway Atoll residents the blackfoot albatross regularly feed offshore of the Columbia River mouth. Guess these birds know what they like to eat given the Oregon coast is over 3,000 miles from Midway.  Hunted almost to extinction for their feathers 100 years ago, the have come back strong on Midway with 420,063 Laysan albatross nests counted here last December by a group of committed volunteers.

Midway’s Sand Island Laysan albatross colony

Before we landed at Midway, we stopped in Honolulu to meet with NOAA scientists and policymakers.  I wrote a blog post for the class (we each are required to do a blog entry as part of the course) and it is shown below.   I have more to say but it is Saturday night on Midway Atoll, population 80 and the Chugash Band is playing.  Gotta go. Peace.

6:00 AM Honolulu Fish Auction

Meet Sean Martin – fisherman, owner/operator of 6 pacific longliner boats, supplier of bait, tackle and safety equipment to the 130 boat longline fleet, former chairman of WESPAC (www.wpcouncil.org) and CEO of POP Hawai (www.pop-hawaii.com), a major equipment supplier to the fleet.  He is giving us a tour of the fish auction today.

Sean Martin leading the tour

Some of the class are wearing flip flops – a no-no inside the auction so Sean walks to his office and gets everybody rubber boots.  This from the man that stands 6’ 5”, is wearing a white t shirt, shorts and tennis shoes…  Should be interesting.

The fish auction sells the fish caught by a limited entry fleet of 130 boats that fishes the Pacific both inside the US EEZ and beyond on the high seas.  These guys go where the fish are; sometimes traveling 1000 miles from Honolulu in search of big eye tuna and swordfish.  The Hawain Longline Association (www.hawaiilongline.org) represents the entire fleet.  Sea Martin is president of HLA.

Today there is around 80,000 lbs of fish being sold.  30,000 lbs is swordfish and there is no market in the Pacific for this fish – no one wants to eat it.  It is all being sold in lots, loaded into containers and shipped to the eastern U.S.  The rest of the fish is mainly tuna – big eye, yellowfin, albacore and some skipjack.  There is some fish in the auction that would be considered bycatch elsewhere – marlin, spearfish, moonfish, mahi mahi and a shark.  Everything is sold fish by fish in the auction – fast, efficient, a well oiled machine.  Most of the fish is sold to local restaurants here on the island. With 8 million tourists coming every year, the demand for fresh fish is always there.   The auction starts at 6 am and is over by 7 am.  The 50,000 lbs of tuna is sold fish by fish, labeled, packed in ice and loaded on trucks and disappears. The auction runs 6 days a week all through the year.

Sean takes us on a tour of one of his boats that are in port for maintenance.  We climb aboard the Caroleigh, a custom side-setter built by Martin in response to federal regulations to reduce albatross by-catch.  He takes us to the bridge and holds court answering questions from the class for 30 minutes.  The Hawaian longline fleet is the most litigated and most regulated fishing fleet in America.  He explains turtle “take” reduction, describes a typical fishing trip that lasts 14-20 days.  He shows is the VMS – vessel monitoring system – that enables NOAA and the Coast Guard to track the entire US fleet anywhere in the Pacific.  The only other working VMS tracking system outside of the feds is in Sean Martin’s office.  Sean explains that longliners catch only a fraction of the tuna in the Pacific with the purse seiners doing the real damage.  He talks about competition from foreign fleets, saying that the US longline fleet is outnumbered 19:1 on the high seas. That Costco across the street from the auction is selling imported Chinese tuna not US-caught and that the foreign factory ships that catch, clean and freeze are doing the real damage.  The Hawaian longline fleet are just hard working Americans making a living and providing fresh fish.  Sean says that NOAA and the environmental groups keep hammering on him to alter his fishing techniques, fish less days at sea, reduce bycatch. He says that much progress has been made in reducing bycatch. He makes a compelling case.

The Pacific longline total catch is worth about $60M a year, according to Sean.  That is mouse nuts compared the rest of the international Pacific tuna fleet.  Sean Marin is a successful robber-baron here in the Pacific. A man like Rockefeller with oil, Stanford with railroads and Gates with software, who arrived in Hawaii on a longliner from California in 1979 and built an empire brick by brick, fought off his environmental foes and NOAA, made changes in the fleet’s fishing practices and is still in business making money.  I like how Sean operates. He gets things done, creates jobs, provides a good product.  He gives the same tour to school kids. The entire longline fishing business with all the bycatch, regulations and restrictions sucks big time.  And each of us could choose to stop eating fish and solve the overfishing problem. But in the meantime you gotta like this man.

10:00 AM  NOAA Pacific Islands Regional Office

We next traveled to downtown Honolulu to the NOAA PIRA office and met first with Lisa Van Atta who holds the title of Assistant Regional Administrator – Protected Resources.   What does she do?  Well if an endangered Hawaiian monk seal hauls out on the Waikiki Beach at noon during the peak tourist season and some dad pops his 5 year old on the seal’s head for a photo, you call Lisa.  She is a lawyer. She fixes things.  And she has a tough job balancing the management of endangered species like the monk seal and the interactions with 8 million tourists here.  As a species, monk seals are in a steep population decline – around 1,000 left with a 4% population lost each year. Somebody shot three seals in the last year in the Main Hawaiian Islands (MHI).  On top of that she has to watch out for the whales, spinner dolphin and turtles.  Like I said she is a lawyer, they fix things.

Lisa talks with confidence and ease about the challenges of her job. She has a great staff including several Duke Nicholas School grads, but is being buried under a mounting paperwork covering not only these megafauna, but now corals that are endangered by climate change. Public outreach, take reduction teams, lawsuits, policy, rules, regulations, restrictions… a tough business in this day and age.  She is good, but she needs more help.

1:30 PM NOAA Pacific Islands Regional Office

Our final meeting of the day is with Dr. Charles Litnan who leads the Hawaiian Monk Seal Survival Enhancement Program.  Charles is an experienced scientist leading the charge to save the monk seal from extinction.  The issue is so complicated and has so many ethical ramifications, I can not even begin to tell this story without more coffee.  All the parts of a great story are here – an ancient marine mammal lineage that has gone extinct in the Caribbean, hanging on in the Mediterranean, but dying out in Hawaii; elected officials who say do what ever to protect the seal, but do not let it die off on my watch, decades of field work in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands (NWHI) where the seal was almost counted to death year after year. And now Charles is supposed to step in and save the species.  The man is smart, hard working and knowledgeable on all aspects of the monk seal, yet he must consider any measure to protect the species – even killing Galapagos sharks that prey on monk seal pups.  The thought of intervening in a natural ecosystem to protect the monk seal by killing the sharks did not go over so well with with the class. Like I said it is complicated… I hope other members of the class will blog on this issue. Asking a NOAA scientist to decide which creature lives and which one dies is above my pay grade.

For more information check out these links:

http://www.fpir.noaa.gov

http://www.eturbonews.com/7373/hawaii-foia-lawsuit-will-be-early-test-new-obama-transparency-pol

http://www.wpcouncil.org/

We had our blog hacked by someone with a web address in Russia a couple weeks ago.  We had to rebuild it and are still working to get the photos and video links reestablished.  Hopefully we will get everything back to the way it was.

In the meantime 2009 has gone and 2010 arrived. And it is shaping up to be a great year for conservation projects.  We have a number of great work opportunities ahead of MVF this year.  Midway Atoll, Rio Parana, Tierra Del Fuego, Bahamas, Mexico and our home waters in Wyoming and Idaho are all opportunities to continue our aerial photo documentatry work.   Our aerial database is up and available for use by conservation organizations, city planners, land trusts and neighborhood as a tool to make land use decisions.   You can click on this link and see photos from the Russian River in Northern California, the Henrys Fork in Idaho and the Chesapeake Bay.  More photos will be added, key worded and available each month.

There was a tremendous amount of negativity about 2009 but many good things happened in river and marine conservation.  While the process-oriented events like Copenhagen always struggle with economic agendas being placed above what is best for the planet, the real place-based conservation projects moved forward with great results.  The biggest factor in 2009 was the economic conditions stopping all development.  We saw major developments stop dead, declare bankruptcy and die as a result of the lack of credit.   One $3.5B development in the Bahamas is not stopped.  Luckily there were no real buildings built thus sparing the ecosystem from certain destruction.  There are plenty of examples like this.

The other major “win” in 2009 was the impact of the down economy on individual behaviors.  People bought less, drove less, traveled less and thus impacted the planet less.  Our goal at MVF is to educate and show that conservation whether measured in land set in trust, rivers restored or reefs protected is good business and the right path for all of us.  So join in with us and let’s do some great work this year.   TM

It has been a while since we last posted.  We have been focused on analyzing our aerial photos from this summer and preparing for the last shoot on the Henrys Fork before the snows come.   We should have around 6,000 aerial photos hosted on the web and available to the community in the next week.

Fall in Wyoming is about as good as it gets. Mornings are usually around 32 degrees. And the afternoon temps usually get up into the 70s.   We have a couple of major fires burning in the valley – one is a prescribed fire to burn off the ground cover, regenerate plants and trees.  The one pictured above is just West of the Jackson Lake Dam in Grand Teton National Park.  It has been burning a week now and they have just begun to fight it with water tankers.  We are expecting rain and snow mid-week so they should get the fires under control by then.

Our work on the Henrys Fork continues to improve. We did another BAP aerial shoot 10 days ago on the lower section of the Ranch.   The macrophytes were so thick and the water so deep that I could not cross in my waders.  Carson went back tot he bank – took off his waders and did the chest deep wade across so we could shoot the far bank.   Pictured below is McCain doing the crossing just above Transect 5A.  Yes there is a major hatch going on. Fish were feeding like mad in the river.

We have a meeting with the US Forest Service, Idaho Fish and Game and Henrys Fork Foundation this week to talk about restoration plans for the Ranch.  While there is much you could do to “restore” a river like add logs, boulders, dredge channels, we are more focused on understanding the basic ecosystem dynamics and leaving the river alone.  Not sure the trumpeter swans or eagles or trout care about how many fish anglers catch on the river.   We don’t either.  They are just fish…

But the Henrys Fork Watershed is a special place as you can tell from our commitment to work and contribute to its well being.  There is a new film being released in November from our good friends Andy and Gene Quinn.  Will send the link when it is done.  Trailer is pretty awesome.   See you on the river…

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Fall is coming to Jackson, Wyoming these days.   The temperature drops down below freezing each night, bull elk can be spotted in groups roving around and the bison are on the move.  We are still working on the Henrys Fork. Our last aerial flight was a BAP low altitude photo recon of the Henrys Lake outlet.   The outlet was restored to its native river bottom after years of the water being channeled through a man-made straight ditch.  Seems the irrigators wanted more water for themselves.  We were baselining the natural channel and flow patterns for the Henrys Fork Foundation.  We shot these photos at 100 ft altitude and the resolution is pretty awesome.  We will put some up on our website and blog this weekend.

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We have two more sets of aerial flights on the Henrys Fork left to complete this year.  We go back to the Ranch and shoot the entire 7 mile section in early October and will also shoot some of the 1990s macrophyte transects done by Ruth Shea.  We can talk about this project in another post.  We also will be doing our third and final Lighthawk aerial survey of the entire Henrys Fork in early October.  So still lots of work to do.

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We have also found some time in the late afternoons to get out on the river and do some fishing.  Our favorite deep hole on the Gros Ventre River has been unproductive and we are not sure why.  There was a family of four river otters living there back in August.  Maybe they ate the big cuts that lived there.

Between our aerial and ground work, we have taken over 40,000 photos this summer.  We have tried to capture the best images of  the Henrys Fork and Snake River ecosystem for conservation use.   We have a couple months of work to do just to process and post them on the web where they will be available to the community.  Our goal is to build awareness of both the beauty and complexity of the ecosystem so that more informed management decisions can be made by federal, state and local communities.  Let us know what else would be helpful here.

Living in Jackson Hole has its pluses and minuses.  And like anywhere in America, once you head out of town and talk to people you find different opinions about important matters.   Ranchers in the West are the old breed, the people who tamed the West, the people who work through the long hard winters protecting their cattle.  They make their living off the land.  On the other hand the people in Jackson make their living off tourism.  We continue to “tax” our visitors, pay our bills and along with our oil and gas royalties, stuff the state treasury and our pockets with enough cash to get through our winter ski season.  Not a bad life.

I had the pleasure of spending some time out in the center part of Wyoming on a real ranch talking to people who had lived, worked and survived off the land for several decades.   While we agreed on many things, the issue of wolves in the eocsystem was not one of them.  And their opinions on what should happen to wolves was about as strong as Sarah’s view of the health care bill.  Respectively, they see it from a different perspective.

But the overriding question here is about reintroduction of extirpated species into an ecosystem.  Is it the right thing to do? Is it the law? How do you mitigate the impacts?   The reintroduced wolves came from Canada – a place with no bison which was the original yellowstone wolves favorite food.   According to the ranch manager these reintroduced wolves are decimating the moose and elk population on this particular 100,000 acre ranch.   And the rancher said wolves should be killed off to protect the elk and moose that people hunt and generate income to the community and ranch itself.

The people in Jackson want to protect the wild and beautiful wolves as an integral component of the natural ecosystem.   We in Jackson make our money off California tourists trying to escape the reality of living in a dying, bankrupt state.   But the ranchers in central Wyoming make their money off the land – the cattle, hunting, fishing.  The more wolves then the less elk and moose, more predation on cattle and sheep, more work for the ranchers.  Less money.

So we reintroduced a species from Canada that only eats moose and elk into an ecosystem with abundant bison that is a much harder kill.  Those who make a living from cattle say kill the wolves, those who make a living from tourism say let the wolves live.  Seems we are back to the wealth extraction from the environment issue… again.

Some say that these wolves are invasive species – like a weed, a dangerous fish, a predator that will slowly disrupt the natural balance of the ecosystem that has existed since the 1930s in Yellowstone.  Others say the wolf brings back the natural balance of predator-prey relationships in a ecosystem that was out of balance.   Since we do a lot of fish work, we could recommend that cutthroat trout be reintroduced into all greater yellowstone rivers to offset the imbalance of rainbows and brown trout.  I doubt those who have an economic interest in fishing would agree. Just like the Wyoming ranchers, we all tend to pick what is in our economic interest rather than what creatures can exist in ecological harmony.

If you have an economic interest in an ecosystem then pure conservation is not possible. You do things to enhance your income, your wealth, your standard of living.   More wolves helps Jackson, hurts the ranchers.  The government is just doing its job and they work for the people. They do not get to vote.  Every time we try to “fix” what we humans “broke” there are consequences.  Maybe the lesson learned from the reintroduction of Canadian wolves into Yellowstone is to protect ecosystems from ecologically breaking in the first place. That is what we are trying to do here at Marine Ventures.  Peace.

I would recommend you watch this trailer from the movie The Cove… While there are always cultural issues between countries, some things are considered sacred regardless. And we each have the right to speak out for what we believe is right and just. These people did that and more. Decide for yourself.