Jo Squire Writes

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Sea Otters and Salmon

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The Alaskan fishermen would never tell you there’s an oversupply of salmon in their rivers, but there can be in their own freezers.

My friend Liz lives in Cordova, a gorgeous much rained-on fishing village on the Alaskan coast. It’s in the Prince William Sound, a stronghold for sea otters. No roads connect into this area, and when you arrive on the ferry, these cute furry sea mammals are the first wildlife you will spot. With coats so thick they bob on their backs when resting, they solemnly observe the world with whiskery faces. Along with salmon, they eat shellfish and crabs caught off the bottom of the ocean. These they bring to the surface, where they use their bellies as a plate to place their live food on.

Nature is tough on the otters and their prey. I once saw a poor crab turn slow circles on an otter’s belly as its claws were plucked off one by one. Each time the crab manoeuvred its fearsome front claws toward the otter’s face, the otter would disorientate it by rolling belly down then belly up again to give the crab a quick dunk into the ocean. For a moment, the crab free floated before a paw recaptured it and replaced it in a more suitable position for the meal to continue.

As the ferry navigates the last calm stretch of water into Cordova, otters swim out of its way. A few dive at the last moment below the cold shimmering surface. Further along, in a sheltered bay, groups of otters float on their backs to form rafts, paws resting across their chests.

It’s easy to pick out the visitors as they eagerly run from window to window while the ferry glides along the coastline into Cordova. We descend to the bottom deck and wait our turn to drive off the ferry. Once on land, Liz parks the car across from the floating raft community, and I’m able to see baby otters held close or balanced on their mothers’ chest. I could watch for ages, but it’s late, and we have a month’s supply of groceries to unpack. At my first opportunity, I’ll walk back down here to watch them some more.

The next morning as I rug up in warm clothing for my return to the shoreline, Liz is attempting to stash salmon from the seasons fishing run into her freezer. As well as the two boxes we’ve carried with us, there’s already a box in there, accidentally left by a long-gone crew member. It’s a challenge. As fast as she forces frozen salmon steaks into the freezer, others are pushed out. Crouched on the floor, a box of salmon at her side, she cusses as several pieces dislodge and rain down on her head all at once. I laugh because It reminds me of a scene in “The Mask “, where, after a night of cavorting on the town, Jim Carey is woken by cops at his front door. When he opens his clothes cupboard to dress, tall stacks of dollar notes fall, sending him into a panic while he tries to re-stash the money.

A few minutes later Liz picks up her mobile.

“Hey Stephanie, how would you like it if I sent some salmon over to you?”

Bear Scares

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With some of my Alaskan friends, I’d planned a 5-day hike in Wrangel St Elias Park, which is about an 8-hour drive from Anchorage. After a spectacular flight through high mountains, the light aircraft drops our group off on the dirt airstrip. By the time we’ve unloaded our packs, the weather has deteriorated, causing us to don waterproof jackets and leggings. It’s still pouring rain in the morning, so instead of packing up camp, we decide to do day walks until the inclement conditions improve. They never do.

A couple of days later, on a slightly better morning, Liz, Mark and I decide to hike up the valley to check out a pass. There are no tracks, and the tundra is waterlogged and muddy. The mountain slopes are drier, but the streams are roaring and difficult to cross, so we alternate between the least of the evils as we track between the tundra and the lower slopes. In doing so, we waste a lot of time.

Eventually, we struggle up a steep slope between mounds of rocks and reach a misty mountain pasture. It’s stunning with green grass, gorgeous flowers and a lower mossy section crossed by crystal-clear brooks. We’re delighted, as apparently are the wild creatures. There’s bear poo all over the place, but everything is so wet, it’s impossible to guess how fresh it is.  

We munch our dried rations in a huddle behind a rock, sheltered from the wind, and then decide to push on further up the pass, now only just around the corner. But the wind is against us, hurtling down from high places and after a while, my friends lose enthusiasm.  But I’m unlikely to ever be here again. Stupidly determined, I want to continue, and they agree to wait behind shelter for my return.

“I won’t be long, “I promise, “I can see the top. It’s only 5 minutes off.”

At this stage, I’ve forgotten that I’m terrified of meeting a bear alone, and the bear poo in the nearby pastures has also slipped my mind. The moment Liz and Mark vanish from sight, I remember all this.

My God, what am I doing? I ask myself. My immediate answer is – Don’t be so silly, what are the chances that during the only 10 minutes I’m separated from friends, I’ll bump into a bear? On this note, I continue, only to find the top is a false pass, a lovely spot, with a glacier off to the left. The summit of the pass is now only 5 minutes up to the right.

I don’t want my friends to wait for too long, so I hurry up the wide green slopes even faster, breathing hard, head down. It doesn’t occur to me that I should be making some noise to scare potential bears off, until out of the corner of my eye, I see movement. When I look up, the enormous hairy backside of a brown bear is silhouetted on top of the pass ahead of me. It’s so big I can see the mist in the space between its hind legs. Fortunately, it’s moving fast. In the opposite direction. In situations like this, I’m not brave, though the bear is as scared of me as I am of it. Abandoning my aspiration to reach the pass, I turn and hurry back down the mountainside, singing noisy bear-go-away songs all the way.

Alex’s Gobies

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Alex has a predilection for fish identification and likes to scout out the rarer species. This gives other dive club members ample opportunity to rib him mercilessly. Early on our Papua New Guinea dive trip, Akiko told him about a rare goby she saw on a night dive that he’d uncharacteristically missed. A look of disbelief crossed his face.

“Really,” he said, “And what was this goby doing.”

“It was just hopping along on the sand, near its burrow.”

“Sorry Akiko, Gobies sleep at night!” retorted Alex, his disbelief justified.

“No, no, this one was dancing. It’s a disco goby and it comes out at night.” Akiko replied, almost a step ahead of him.

“No use trying to patch it up now, Akiko, Gobies only come out in the day,” said Alex, determined to have the last word.

“No this is a special one, it’s Alex’s disco goby!” said Akiko.

The ghost of Alex’s disco goby haunts conversations over the next few days. Then in the not-so-good weather on our last day, when the boat is sheltered behind Nuakata Island, we discover that a rare shrimp goby is found in this bay. Alex, of course, is determined to see it. He’s first out on dive deck in the morning. Any buddy will do, but it’s 6 am and no-one else is close to ready, so he drops down into the water alone beside the MV Chertan. And, needless to say, he finds it. By midday, he’s taken some fantastic goby photos.

Shrimp gobies are usually found in pairs which live in burrows that their accompanying shrimps kept clean of rubble. His photo shows the pair, hovering over the sand, their long bodies partly inside their burrow. They are pretty with a row of bright orange dots along their pale streamlined sides, and iridescent blue markings on their faces. Alex tells Morris, the chef, not to wait for him to serve lunch. He’s persuaded Aran into bringing his huge camera with multiple attachments back down under for another photoshoot of the rare Nanna Shrimp Gobies.

Alex is not the only one taking advantage of this location. Yesterday three of us took a walk past a couple of villages on Nuakata Island, and today our boat has a few reciprocal visitors. A local girl paddles over, and lets Helen use her outrigger canoe for a jaunt around the bay. Helen has done this before and manoeuvres the craft adeptly, a huge grin on her face. She returns with stories of how the locals know this island as Octopus Island because it has 8 points, and how the young girl walks for an hour and a half along the bay and over a mountain to school and then later returns the same way.  When I tell a PNG crew member about this and ask if Nuakata means octopus, he giggles and says that someone must have seen a map of the island and made up a story about it being called Octopus Island.

Thoughts and Environment

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Let us recognise the soul in all sentient beings, and in doing so, honour our own.

Save the Elephants!

Theoretical Ecological Collapse: Any Excuse To Kill Elephants
by Jarad Kukura | Apr 1, 2020

Feeling the pressure of the United Kingdom’s upcoming decision on a trophy hunting import ban, Botswana reiterated their unscientific opinion that the country has too many elephants. In their eyes, hunting is desperately needed to control the population of 130,000 elephants that far exceeds the country’s theoretical carrying capacity of 50,000.
The 50,000 number aligns with a density of 0.2 elephants per sq. km that was derived from an outdated study stating tree loss begins to occur at that elephant density. However, research into ecological benchmarking using historical data shows Botswana’s elephant populations are lower than expected given a scenario of limited poaching.
But elephants live in complex and dynamic environments. The idea carrying capacity can be accurately calculated in highly variable environments, even with the best intentions, is unfounded.
And many hunting advocates attempt to leverage this scientific uncertainty around elephant densities as justification for lethal population management. Hunting advocates invoke the precautionary principle, stating elephant numbers should be artificially reduced if they could irreversibly damage ecosystems and imperil other species. In other words, better to be safe than sorry.
The precautionary principle has a long history of being used to justify killing elephants in the absence of clear scientific evidence of environmental damage. But the precautionary principle also has a long history of failure when it comes to killing elephants to protect habitats and biodiversity.
Allan Savory admits his experiment of killing 40,000 elephants to prevent desertification in Zimbabwe was a complete failure. He calls this experiment “the saddest and greatest blunder” of his life. Similarly, Kruger National Park’s officials led a decades long culling program to limit elephant numbers under the guise of protecting large tree species. Again, this experiment failed to prove a clear relationship between elephant densities and dead trees.
Both culling experiments came about in the 1960s when wildlife management was still in its infancy. An argument can be made the mistakes can be forgiven because scientific data was at a premium and the understanding of population dynamics in conservation was still progressing.
But modern research confirms what past management decisions demonstrated, there is no ecological reason to artificially reduce Botswana’s elephant. The cries of habitat destruction caused by elephants are unfounded. The habitat is changing because of ungulate populations rebounding from the rinderpest epidemic at the turn of the 20th century.
However, not managing elephant populations makes many people uncomfortable. If lethal population management is off the table, does that mean non-lethal techniques like translocations and contraception must be used? Those methods are often costly and come with their own issues.
Instead of asking how elephant populations should be managed, the question should be if elephant populations need to be managed. Typically, the answer to this question is “yes” because humans have intervened in the natural world by erecting fences and restricting resources. However, those anthropogenic interventions are forms of bottom-up regulation techniques that already limit elephant populations. Top-down techniques, lethal or not, are both redundant and unnatural.
Many African herbivores evolved larger sizes, in part, as a predator defense mechanism. Species larger than 150 kg have few natural predators and are bottom-up regulated in terms of population numbers. Species larger than 1,000 kg, like elephants, generally have no natural predators once they pass their juvenile stage and have populations regulated by the availability of resources. Essentially, restrict resources to restrict elephant populations.
Despite the propensity to classify humans as super predators, early Homo sapiens likely did not naturally regulate elephant populations. Archaeological evidence shows Middle Stone Age sites in Africa were devoid of elephants. Elephants, like most large herbivores, have a slow life history and would have been especially susceptible to extinction if humans naturally targeted them as a prey species.
Taking a hands-off approach to elephant management forces us to accept that we cannot control nature, something we have been fighting to accomplish for generations. But this laissez faire approach is not a novel idea when it comes to African wildlife.
Tony Sinclair was heavily criticized in the 1960s for allowing the Serengeti wildebeest population to balloon to previously unrecorded numbers. Biologists condemned Sinclair’s failure to implement lethal control over the wildebeest population and feared a complete ecological collapse was inevitable.
Sinclair believed wildebeest numbers would eventually stabilize at an appropriate level given the amount of resources available. And he was right. His experiment showed wildebeest numbers were resource dependent and eventually stabilized. There was no ecological collapse in the Serengeti due to wildebeest overpopulation.
It is clear Botswana does not have too many elephants and hunting will not have any impact on preventing a theoretical ecological collapse. Yet, the country continues to promote their opinions as scientific facts. If the country wishes to base their opinions on experiments from the 1960s, perhaps they should consider the ones that were successful and not the ones that failed.