A Shoreline Remembrance

CARL SAFINA

Orienting Memories

Well over forty years ago—I was about five—my father drove us from Brooklyn to Long Island for a day of picnicking and fishing at a coastal state park. At one point, my mother bravely walked me into the edge of a gull colony. A city girl from Manhattan, she must have been almost as frightened as I, because I remember her squeezing my hand and holding her hat down as the birds—seemingly the size of condors—swooped in with menacing threat calls and the close whoosh of wings. I was terrified. But then suddenly at my feet, there was an amazing bowl of grass and feathers cradling three astonishing, huge speckled eggs. It was my first brush with something wild, and it filled me with a sense of mystery and magical potential. Before the escalating agitation of the great birds forced my mother and me to beat a prudent retreat, that nest made a lifetime impression.

Years later I began a decade of studying terns just down the beach from that same colony, and I visited the gulls regularly. When I began research toward my Ph.D. in ecology, I ran my boat each morning past the same island the gulls nested on and the very shoreline my mother had led me along.

For more than twenty years, I lived only about four miles from that gull colony, and each morning when I walked the mile from my home to the bay I saw that gull island. No one else in my professional world stayed in a single place for so long. Everyone went from home to college to graduate school to post docs to jobs.

I did most of these things, but just by chance, I never moved very far. During this lifetime in one place, I noticed changes in abundance of fish and other creatures. The fish I hunted for food and fun—striped bass, flounders, sea bass, sharks, marlin, tunas, plus sea turtles—all seemed in a continuous ebb tide of excessive catch and population decline. Fishermen I knew were grumbling, but virtually no one in the scientific community and not a single environmental group was talking about changes in fish populations.

Learned, sophisticated people, it seemed, just didn't stay in one place long enough to see changes over time. Funding agencies wanted results, not pointless, repetitive long-term monitoring studies. Other ecologists were obsessed with "hypothesis testing"—preferring to guess rather than patiently observe—a quicker route to "getting papers" and getting promotions.

But for the simple reason that I stayed put long enough to gain a place-based personal history, I witnessed the diminishment of my natural world. First it saddened me, then angered me, then outraged me to action. My approach to fishing changed and my career as scientist took a different direction. I wanted to tell everyone how drastic these changes had been. Personally witnessing history made me appreciate time's great orienting power. Time constantly transforms space. Like tide, it waits for no one.

Why the Past Is Important

Everything is on the way to becoming different, but in nature conservation, the past is the only rational guide to a better future. This is not true in medicine or electrical engineering or communications, where the past offers little insight on future developments. But we have diminished every realm of nature—forests, fishes, corals, climate—so thoroughly that almost no controls are left for comparison. The past must often become the control site.

Control sites are important. In tropical and subtropical seas, the U.S.-owned uninhabited Northwestern Hawaiian Islands and Palmyra Atoll are among few control sites left. Recent studies compared relative weight or biomass of big versus small fishes between the main Hawaiian Islands, the remote Northwest Hawaiian Islands, and Palmyra. The results: the weight of big, carnivorous fishes was only 3 percent of the entire fish community around the main Hawaiian Islands, but was 54 percent in the remote Northwest Hawaiian Islands, and even more around Palmyra Atoll. Even greater differences have been found when scientists surveyed the extremely remote Kingman atoll in the Line Islands—here, top predators comprised 85 percent of reef fish biomass. I've been to many of these places and the difference is profoundly striking—and a bit scary because of the abundance of big sharks. My book Eye of the Albatross relates my impressions of the amazing numbers of tuna and sharks around Midway Atoll—closed to fishing for half a century.

On the basis of the main Hawaiian Islands alone, no living person could have described the changes and no hypothesis could have been tested. So what of the rest of the world? We have no untouched Newfoundland to compare with the one we've fished for centuries.

The past is our only marker, orienting us in a trackless sea to the receding coast of our origins. Nature has no hope in the absence of history. But wringing information out of the past is problematic because scientists generally weren't around to document what was happening. Yet I want to ask whether ecologists overestimate this difficulty, insisting on standards of proof higher than necessary to get at the truth.

In other fields people seem to have less trouble accepting historical writings and authoritative anecdote. No one seems skeptical about what Europeans wore in the fifteenth century, or what their farm animals were like, or how Christopher Columbus's ships were built, though that information didn't come from scientists' clipboards.

So why does it seem unsatisfactory and unconvincing when we read Ferdinand Columbus's description that "in those twenty leagues, the sea was thick with turtles so numerous it seemed the ships would run aground on them and were as if bathing in them." Bathing in turtles? Surely, that can't be accurate!

We accept as credible Francisco Pizzaro's description of contact with the Incas but view as untrustworthy or even dismissible the notion of Caribbean turtles so locally dense during the 1600s that one Edward Long wrote, "It is affirmed that vessels which have lost their latitude in hazy weather have steered entirely by the noise which these creatures make in swimming." Both are equally anecdotal, yet even I will admit more skepticism about nonscientists'...