July 4, 2007

I awoke at sea about 60 nautical miles northwest of San Diego.  Greeting me on deck at 6 a.m. was dense fog and an ocean slick-calm.  Courtesy of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, I’m aboard the U.S. government ship David Starr Jordan.

This cruise is part of a shark abundance survey that started in the mid-1990s.  We’ll also be doing some oceanography, taking profiles of temperature, salinity and depth, and doing sonar transects to get some measure of plankton.  Tax money well spent, for a change.

Mainly we expect to be catching, tagging, and releasing Blue and Mako sharks.  I’ve caught these with rod-and-reel on my own boat, and I’ve seen some brutes.  But this is a nursery area, so we’re expecting mainly baby sharks.

We’ll try to see how many sharks are out there, says chief scientist Dr. Suzie Kohin.  The fishing method is a “short” longline:  two miles of cable with 200 hooks.  (Commercial longliners often use 25 miles of line, sometimes twice that.)  The hooks are J-shaped, steel, with 2-inch shanks and a 1-inch gap.

We start making our first set just after 6 a.m.  The cable is stored on a big drum about four feet in diameter.  The end is run overboard through pulleys and tied to a big buoy with a flag.  The boat moves slowly forward, pulling the line out.  Hooks and leaders have to be attached as the line goes out.

The hooks are kept racked along the rims of large plastic garbage pails, about 100 to a pail.  The pails hold the leaders, about 12 feet long.  At the end of each leader is a large stainless snap that grips the longline.

Two people pick out hooks and hand them to two other people who bait them.  The bait is dead mackerel, and the hook goes in the mouth, out the gills, and then into the body. 

The baited hooks get handed to the person designated as the “clipper.”  Every fifty feet, the longline is marked, and at that mark a leader gets clipped on.  Every five hooks, a brightly colored buoy gets clipped on.

My job is buoy boy, and to qualify you have to count to five.  In practice this is much more difficult than it sounds.  Suddenly the most important question in my life is, “Was that the fourth hook, or the fifth?”  At any rate, our wake is soon marked by a line of bright, bobbing buoys, looking festive.

Raining on the parade is a California Sea Lion diving among the baits.  If he’s hungry, he’s relieving each hook of its bait.  We can only look on helplessly, hoping he’s already had a hearty breakfast.  Many commerical and recreational fishers hate these animals and the Marine Mammal Protection Act.

Setting takes nearly two hours.  Then we let the line soak about three hours.  Then, with the hazy outline of San Clemente Island just 4 miles west of us, we start hauling, starting with the last hook set, everything in reverse.  Turns out the sea lion did not strip our baits.

Baited hooks start coming back just as they went out.  For over 20 minutes, it’s hook after hook.  And then the sharks start.

At 10:26, a small Blue Shark turns up on a hook.  It’s less than three feet, one of the smallest “blue-dogs” I’ve ever seen.  Its leader gets unclipped from the main line and it is led to the back of the ship and into a cradle.  The cradle is raised out of the sea and the scientists, on their knees on a platform, get to work.

Suzie and two assistants cover its eyes, and put a hard plastic hose-end into its mouth to keep it ventilated with water and oxygen.  This quiets it.

They insert a streaming numbered tag that is anchored into the skin with what looks like a small steel arrowhead.  Into its dorsal fin goes another tag that looks like a cattle ear-tag.  A snip of fin goes into a vial for DNA analysis, and some blood is drawn.  The shark then gets an injection of tetracycline, which will reveal its growth rate if it is eventually killed and returned by a fishermen for the offered reward.  Some of this bothers me, honestly, but I understand the value in it.  Sharks certainly need better management.  We need the information on which to base good management policies.

This baby Blue is followed  by two others and four Makos.  Only one is male.  One of the Makos is a husky five-and-a-half footer, about 110 pounds, with a thick, sleek body.  Because of its size, it gets a couple of high-tech tags, one to track it via satellite and another that can store information about its vertical travels.

When it gets released, it bucks out of the cradle like a thoroughbred, and vanishes before the bubbles clear.

300 miles west of Mexico, 12º North.Everyone was back at work all day. Our sightings suggest that we are on the outer mixing zone with inshore fauna. One of the Spotted Dolphins might have been the inshore form; it looked quite husky. Brown Boobies showed up in numbers in the morning, and at 3 pm we started seeing a few turtles.

By the way, 30 years ago these turtles, the Olive Ridleys were quite rare. To use their meager skin for leather, people killed females by the hundreds of thousands when they came ashore Mexican beaches to nest. Now they are quite common.

I spent a long time watching a Brown Booby attempt to catch flyingfish scared airborne by our bow. The flyingfish don’t fly, but they can glide as much as 100 meters. When they start to sag into the sea, rapid lashes of their lower tail-lobe can give them the boost they need to get airborne again. The effect is a fish capable of astonishingly rapid, prolonged, alert sailing above the waves. Chases between boobies and flying fish sometimes continue above and below the surface, and above again. When closing in behind a flyingfish that drops into the sea, a booby can make a very shallow dive at high speed and zoom through the water so fast that in a split second and seemingly without losing speed it is again airborne and in full pursuit. They are birds that can fly, dive, and fly again in one streaking motion that defies the eyes. But the flyingfish pose a challenging and deft match, and seem to value their lives. Most of the time, the birds miss.

Each night we deploy a wide-mouth fine-mesh net called a manta at the surface and a two-hoop device called a bongo-net deep, 200 to 300 meters. Their haul of plankton and other small animals reflects the general amount of life we see at the dip-netting station and the numbers of fishes, mammals, and birds we see during daylight. The more we see, the more plankton we find in the nets. Those nets also catch larger things, like the Barbled Dragonfish that the bongo net engulfed on the night of the 19th. Clearly the prototype for night-sweat-inducing monster, this eel-like, foot-long fish is black, its sides lined with light-emitting organs called photophores, its mouth disproportionally enormous and lined with oversize dagger-teeth. It’s capable of swallowing meals that are gigantic for its size. Thank god it doesn’t grow to 15 feet.

- Carl Safina

400 miles offshore, 12º North. Weather slowly relented over the course of the day but never got really below Beaufort 4 or 5 (numerous white caps and some spray). In the morning the wind rose again to 30 knots as rain swept in.Birdwise, we’re seeing Juan Fernandez Petrels, Wedgies, a few Leach’s Storm Petrels, and a few Nazca Boobies. And I mean a few. I was thinking the bird density is about one per square mile. The professional, Rich Pagen, thinks it’s more like four. Rich says, though, that it’s hard to guess how many birds we might be seeing if not for human affects on seabird populations thousands of miles away. He says that, for instance, we might be seeing fair numbers of Parkinson’s Petrels if not for the ravages of introduced rats and cats on New Zealand out-islands where they nest. His comment, “If it wasn’t for the Juans and Leach’s, there’d be very little to look at,” prompted me to jot this blues song:

It’s a big, big ocean,
It’s a wide, wide space,
Ain’t hardly nothin’
All over this place.
c Ain’t seen no turtles
For days and days,
And even the dolphins,
Have changed their ways,
Well it’s lonely way out here,
And now I’m watchin’ raindrops fall.
If it wasn’t for Juan Fernandez Petrels,
I wouldn’t have no Juan at all.
But actually, the day picked up. We added Brown Boobies and Red-footeds to the day’s sightings and the first Pink-footed Shearwater of the trip for me, flying with a Wedgie for comparison. I watched a Juan skimming the wave contours for a long while and never saw it flap, just appropriating the wind’s energy for its own flight, like one of its albatross cousins.

Throughout the day we saw four groups of dolphins: 2 Spotted, one mixed Spinner and Spotted, and one unidentified. All groups were small, and sea conditions made spotting difficult.

Night dip-netting proved us back into more productive water, with numerous flyingfish (2-wing, 4-wing, and short-winged species) and squid ( Sthenoteuthis) in the lights.

Only a couple of days left before this magical mystery tour wraps.

- Carl Safina

Bad weather continues though not as rough. Still the mammal observers cannot work.Early in the day we came upon a large abandoned gillnet, greatly tangled up with itself. They crew decided to launch the small boat to retrieve it, and though they sank a large tangled portion, they brought a big portion on board. Surprisingly it had no tangled turtles. It did have numerous bones from at least one billfish. (see PHOTO)

We saw one large mixed seabird/dolphin/tuna aggregation, but rough seas precluded good looks.

Much rain part of the day. The longevity of this bout of bad weather is unusual here. All of us are making reasonably good use of the time doing other work, but we’re eager for the return of fair winds.

Bad weather, no science.

Science cancelled today due to continued heavy weather. A lot of computer work is getting done, a lot of catching up.The murder game came ended abruptly when, against the rules, a member of the deck crew hid the murder weapon—then saw me rummaging around for it.