Henry Peters | Melbourne, Australia

Melbourne City: a high density destination. Image: Reinis Traidas

Standing atop the Hollywood Hills in California and peering out across the vast expanses of Los Angeles, the blanket of smog in the atmosphere is so dense the city’s skyscrapers are almost invisible. Cars are a necessity in Los Angeles and if urban sprawl continues unabated in Melbourne, it too could be confronted with the visual effects of a large carbon footprint.

There are many valid reasons to halt urban sprawl and focus on urban consolidation given Melbourne’s burgeoning population. Environmental impact on Carbon emissions, quality of life for those living in Melbourne’s expanding fringes, and our transport system’s inability to facilitate further urban sprawl, are just a few.

Many residents are choosing to object to high-density growth but the ideal of a large backyard will need to eventually give way to urban consolidation. Proposals in Camberwell, Mitcham and Box Hill have been vetoed in past years despite potential for population management, sustainability and traffic reduction. Director of City Design for the City of Melbourne, Rob Adams, believes Camberwell is a prime location for high-density development. “I can’t think of a better place for low-rise high-density development [than Camberwell]”, he said.

Paul Little, from global development group Aurecon Pty Ltd agrees with Adams. “[Camberwell junction] has excellent access to public transport options and has seen significant growth in commercial floor space capable of being used for office purposes.” High-density developments in Camberwell and Mitcham have needed the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal (VCAT) to step in and overruled community rejection. Many residents remain unconvinced that high-density living is the best way to combat a growing carbon footprint.

Victorian Commissioner for Environmental Sustainability, Kate Auty, says that residents often object to high-rise residential and multi-use buildings because they feel excluded in the planning process. “(Residents) are opposed to having something stuffed down through their letterbox that says this is what’s going to happen and they’re not engaged in the discussion”, Auty said. Many don’t feel obligated to address the environmental concerns posed by urban sprawl.

A report issued by the Whitehorse City Council outlines the basis for community rejection of another high-density development. In 2004, Whitehorse rejected the proposal for a 17-level and 11-level pair of residential towers at 1-19 Colombo Street in Mitcham. Locals lodged over 600 objections to the initial project, which was dubbed the ‘Mitcham Monster’. These concerns will need to be reassessed if Melbourne wants to manage the exponential growth of its population without reverting to urban sprawl.

According to the report, one reason for council rejection was the “building is too big and too high”. The report elaborates, “the scale and form of the building is inconsistent with surrounding buildings.” Another point for rejection was “it will increase parking problems for rail users” and “air quality will be further affected by the increased traffic.” The report neglects to realise air quality overall will improve because people would be traveling less distance by car and more by train, while any parking could be avoided by implementation of underground parking or even a multi-level parking building beside the station.

Whitehorse also cited “the over sized building will devalue the surrounding properties.” Federal Labor MP Kelvin Thomson disagrees with the overall Australian consensus that higher property value is good for Melbourne.
“Housing is a necessity like food, water, electricity”, Thomson said. “Why do we cheer when the prices of houses go up?” Higher property value alienates Melbourne’s middle to low income bracket.”

But residential growth in Melbourne’s CBD has been impressive despite community rejection of high-density development in suburban areas. “The population in central Melbourne has increased from 30,000 to 100,000 and they’re all in apartments”, Adams said. Eventually, the ‘not in my back yard’ stance will be ignored.

Despite the trivialities of some reasons for community rejection, some potential problems associated with high-density development need to be avoided. Water conservation, ventilation, energy efficiency and overshadowing of adjacent Primary Schools should all be legitimate concerns for high-density developers.
Early Childhood Teacher at St. Michael’s Grammar School, Emily Poore, said that sunlight in primary schools is crucial to the positive development of young children. “Kids need to be able to run around and the sun definitely has an impact on their intrinsic motivation at school,” Poore said.

But Adams said European cities have proven that high-density buildings are more equipped to manage population growth, sustain the environment and function symbiotically with transport infrastructure.“None of it has to be high-rise. I’m talking about five to six storeys in height. The sort of stuff you might find in European cities like Barcelona”, Adams said.

High-density developments close to existing transport infrastructure are optimal because they reduce the need to use cars and limit traffic. Central Coburg, for instance, is “desirable because it’s close to both the (train) station and the transport corridor”, Adams said.

Despite the viability of more infrastructure in these inner-city activity centres, the government has allowed extension in areas like Cranbourne many kilometres from the CBD and without a developed train network.
Cranbourne residents are too reliant on cars and being pushed away from economic opportunity in the CBD as fuel prices rise.

Professor of Transport Studies at Monash University, Graham Currie, points out that the social implications of further urban sprawl are also profound. “Young people demonstrate higher unemployment and lower educational and social participation in fringe areas”, Currie said. If this is the case then criminality could also be spiked by urban sprawl. Low-income earners are being effectively stranded in areas like Cranbourne. Everyday access to the CBD is coming to them at a greater cost, let alone residence closer to the city.

“By stopping the expansion of the city and concentrating on creating communities in and around the existing fabric, places like Cranbourne maybe in 10 or 15 years time start to get its own urban area and hopefully fed by public transport”, Adams said.

Greater carbon emissions, social and economic alienation of residents on the ever-expanding fringe and pressure on a buckling transport system present a dark future for Melbournians. Identifying areas for high-density consolidation is only the first stage of managing our population. The residents in these areas need to start co-operating and realise that our environment is at stake and not just the view from their backyard.

Henry Peters is a student currently at Monash University in Melbourne.

The misunderstood monsters of the sea have once again been thrust into the spotlight after the recent incident last month when a surfer died after a shark attack in Gracetown, Western Australia. Despite this, experts say man does more damage to sharks rather than what we are led to believe in popular culture. Audrey Lee dives in the deep end to investigate.

A three-metre shark as it surged towards a chunk of tuna carcass attached to a rope. Image: Audrey Lee

Beneath the first blush of an early September predawn light, a fierce wind lashed the sullen, logy waves, stirring up a blast of fresh salt air that consumed me. The loud droning of the engines interrupted the tranquility of the untamed sea as our speedboat jetted across the ocean just off the coast of Gansbaai in South Africa.

With 15 others onboard this 11-metre catamaran, we were on an expedition most would call a ‘reckless’ one. The one animal we fear most was the one we were hoping to meet that morning: the great white shark.

Buckets of diluted rancid minced fish parts, tuna blood and oil, or otherwise called chum, were tossed into the water from the stern. The bristling breath of the sea was engulfed by a long, unbroken trail of this malodorous concoction, snaking its way towards the horizon. The sharks’ sense of smell is so sensitive it can detect even a single drop of blood in the water up to 5 kilometres away.

The boat finally came to a complete standstill and we found ourselves stranded in the beasts’ lair. The choppy waves shook the boat like a rag doll, with the surrounding waters turning crimson from the chum. The cold wind blew harshly, cutting my face like piercing needles. The ocean was a sepulcher. Still raring to go, I climbed into a large cage that was fixed to the starboard at water level. The icy water restricted my legs a little, but I continued to tread to stay warm, as I waited anxiously with bated breath. All other eyes on deck were kept peeled for that familiar triangular fin that might break the water surface.

“Shark!”

It wasn’t long before a fellow member cried out in a keening falsetto. My heart began to race. Most would scurry to shore at the sound of that word, but I put on my snorkel and ducked underwater. The three-metre shark lunged towards a chunk of tuna carcass attached to a line next to where I was. Its huge jaws exposed, baring row upon row of deadly serrated teeth. Its formidable tail was thrashing around wildly, churning up sea bubbles and impairing my vision.

As the bubbles soon began to clear, the shark had already devoured its prey in a matter of seconds. Overwhelmed with a feeling of awe, I edged in closer, instantly captivated by the animal’s majestic performance. The shark glided gracefully towards the cage, its large, unblinking black eyes fixated onto mine. With only so much of a couple of steel bars separating us, I was centimetres from it. I was almost certain that the shark could easily wrench the bars out and attack me if it wanted to. But it didn’t. Like an inquisitive child, I saw a flickering light within its barely visible dark pupils, as it gazed upon me. Unthinkably, the great white disappeared abruptly into the murkiness. The most feared predator on earth… was afraid of me.

The ocean covers about two thirds of the world’s surface and is home to over 80 per cent of life on Earth. The first sharks are known to have lived in the ocean for more than 400 million years, about 150 million years before the age of the dinosaurs. When all other life on Earth was wiped out, sharks have managed to survive five major mass extinctions.

They are the apex predators in the marine environment, helping to maintain the proportional balance of various marine species in the ecosystem. They control the populations below them, essentially eliminating weaker species and thus, creating new ones.

Sharks are known to have terrorised the hearts of people, many of whom are victims of traditional misconceptions and beliefs portrayed by the media. Steven Spielberg’s fear-provoking classic movie, Jaws, released in 1975 is a prime example.

“Jaws was a completely unrealistic and over-dramatised portrayal of the great white shark,” Rebecca Davis, founder of Save Our Sharks Australia, says of the film. “Unfortunately, the fear it instilled into people who saw the movie has continued to influence generation upon generation.”

Even Peter Benchley, the late author of the novel Jaws, wrote an article in 1995 titled “Misunderstood Monsters”, admitting to the damage his book has done to the reputation of sharks.

“I couldn’t write “Jaws” today”, he wrote. “The extensive new knowledge of sharks would make it impossible for me to create, in good conscience, a villain of the magnitude and malignity of the original.”

Scientists and experts have long tried to debunk the myth that sharks are mindless killing machines. Dr. Demian Chapman, a research scientist currently based in Peru from the Institute for Ocean Conservation Science and head of the Institute’s Shark Research Program, is one such expert.

Growing up in New Zealand, Dr Chapman spent most of his childhood on the beach. Like most children, he was fearful of sharks, but became fascinated with them and was “hooked” by the time he realised they were not the “monsters” he perceived them to be.

His fieldwork involves the studying of shark reproduction and behavioural patterns, and he has found them to be amazingly tame.

“I’ve been near thousands and thousands of sharks,” he says. “All the ones that people are very afraid of, and I’ve never been bitten by any of those. In fact, I’ve been bitten more by my dog than sharks.”

According to a statistical study conducted by Taronga Conservation Society Australia, there have only been 52 human fatalities due to shark attack, in Australia in the last 50 years. The last fatal attack happened to actress, Marcia Hathaway, at Sydney Harbour in 1963.

Michael Skoletsky, Executive Director of Shark Savers, says of death from shark bites is usually caused by blood loss. When a shark does bite a person, he claims, “it’s extremely rare that it would bite a person twice”.

“Sharks don’t have arms so sometimes the only way for them to tell or to taste whether something is food is by taking a bite, and they have big mouths,” says Skoletsky.

Upon hearing my shark cage diving experience, Skoletsky says the only reason the shark approached the cage was because of the chum.

“That shark probably would not have wanted to come near you if they weren’t attracting the shark, and they had to work pretty hard at that. They may be chumming long before you got into the cage. So that shows you that the sharks are not there to eat you.”

A shark fin displayed in JADE Chinese Seafood Restaurant in Perth, Western Australia. Image: Audrey Lee

Albeit sharks are often seen as the “bad guys,” Dr Chapman argues that in reality, “we [humans] are the bad guys because we kill more of them”.

Research has shown precipitous declines in many shark species. Michael Aw, founding director of OceanNEnvironment and a shark expert, estimates over 100 million sharks are killed each year, where 26 to 73 million sharks are killed purely for their fins. As a result, over one-third of the shark species are classified as endangered or threatened by extinction under the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN) Red List.

Shark finning is a common practice where fishermen would pull a shark on deck and slice off its fins while it is often still alive. The rest of the shark is then thrown back into the sea to die either by bleeding to death or suffocation. As shark meat is relatively inexpensive and less profitable, their fins are primarily the reason behind this lucrative industry.

According to Dr Chapman, there is about 20 to 25 species of sharks that make up the fin trade, such as Whale Shark, Mako, Hammerhead, Thresher Shark and Grey Nurse. Putting it simply – the larger the fin, the higher the price. According to Dr Chapman, as far as species that are highly valued, such as the Hammerheads, their fins possess certain “characteristics that the fin traders and consumers find desirable, and can fetch up to $140 per kilogram of hammerhead fins.”

Depleted shark populations are hard to rehabilitate, because as Skoletsky puts it, “sharks have very slow reproduction rate, there’s no way for them to reproduce quickly enough to overcome the fishing.” An average shark can take up to 20 years to reach sexual maturity and even then produces only two to three pups a year.

“Shark populations may take decades to recover, if they are given a chance to, or may never recover if this slaughter continues,” Skoletsky says.

However, there are currently no international laws protecting sharks, as most of the oceans are not within the jurisdiction of any one country. At the conference of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) held this March in Doha, Qatar, four species of sharks, including the Hammerheads, were up for consideration in their endangered list. Unfortunately, Japan opposed this move.

“The Japanese are extremely active in lobbying against these proposals and using what influence they have to get other countries to vote the same way. It was very disheartening. The sharks came very close, which just goes to show that a majority of countries do recognise this problem and are willing to deal with it. But it’s this handful of countries that are blocking it, simply because they are making a lot of money out of it,” Dr Chapman says of the Japanese at that meeting.

“And also what’s important to note is that the proposals that were up were not to ban trade in shark fins of these species. It was just to monitor the trade in this species. Just to monitor. Which is ludicrous.”

To date, only 17 countries including the European Union (EU) have laws against shark finning, and Australia is one of them. In most of these cases where the practice of shark finning is prohibited, fishermen would have to land the entire shark and not just their fins.

Australia also has regulations that protect some shark species such as the Great White and the Grey Nurse shark and has limit fishermen to a certain quota per year. Nonetheless, sharks are still allowed to be fished and fins are exported overseas.

There are nations that have banned shark fishing altogether. This May, Hawaii became the first US state to have passed a complete ban on all types of shark fin commerce. Not only are fishermen not allowed to fin sharks, landing or marketing shark fin is also strictly prohibited.

In September 2009, Palau established the world’s first shark sanctuary and banned all shark-fishing activities in its waters. Early this year, Maldives banned shark fishing within a restricted zone that covers 90,000 square kilometres of water. Instead, both Palau and Maldives rely heavily on tourism for economic survival.

Erika Tumambing | Melbourne, Australia

Alive and healthy: a Kangaroo and its Joey. Image: Tim Williams

For Denise Garratt, it all began in the depths of the Victorian bush, where a fascination with the kangaroos in her paintings became a lifelong passion for wildlife rescue.

“It was just something that was meant to be,” she says, “they’re exquisite creatures.”

A former painter, Garratt left her art gallery thirty years ago for a life in the bush, where she studied and lived with a mob of kangaroos on a remote property for seven years. She has nursed hundreds of joeys and kangaroos back to health since. “Some mornings I might get six calls before 9 o’clock for animals injured on the road all across the state,” she says.

The real tragedy, says Garratt, is that not all incidents are immediately reported, leaving injured kangaroos stranded on the roads until someone else calls for help, by which time it may be too late. “Ninety per cent of motorists will hit kangaroos and keep going,” she sighs as she bottle-feeds little Bill, one of the many joeys she has taken into her care.

“There’s this huge area for education that is desperately needed to encourage people to think about driving from dusk to dawn a little more carefully where wildlife is known to be on the roads.”

For this reason, Wildlife Victoria rescuer, Fiona Rowley, believes kangaroo numbers are in decline. “Kangaroos have very few natural predators,” she says, “but there is little doubt in my mind that man is the kangaroo’s biggest predator.” Landowners and farmers are now applying for culling permits under the misconception that kangaroo numbers are out of control and taking food and water from their sheep and cattle which, according to Rowley, is not the case. “We have now built so many housing estates and commercial development[s] that we have landlocked many mobs of kangaroos
into the only remaining parcels of land and made them easier to see,” she says.

Australian Society for Kangaroos coordinator, Nikki Sutterby, agrees. Road deaths, drought, commercial shooting and loss of habitat have all shown how humans have put the national icon at risk of large-scale extinction.

“Not only are they shot in rural areas by farmers, they are displaced by development and civilisation that is extending at a rapid rate in regional and metropolitan areas,” she says. Sutterby fears kangaroos may never recover from their current critical situation. This is exacerbated by continued government support of the kangaroo industry, which slaughters millions each year – 3.6 million in 2008 – to supply meat for export and pet food.

“The Australian government is in denial about the plight of kangaroos and I believe they won’t realise until it’s too late,” she says.

Garratt has dedicated her life to saving kangaroos and other wildlife, including koalas and possums. Aside from being on a number of animal welfare boards and ethics committees, including the Department of Sustainability and Environment and the Platypus Conservancy and Victorian Wildlife Rehabilitation Council, Garratt is one of the founding members of the RSPCA wildlife branch and the president of Help For Wildlife.

“I work 36 hours a day,” she muses. “It’s very rewarding. But in some cases it can tear your heart out when you don’t get them through and you can’t save them.” Running a wildlife shelter, she says, is particularly difficult for those on the outer skirts of the city that take in high maintenance wildlife. There are also travelling, food and facility costs to cover, most of which comes out of her hip pocket. As a non-government funded organization, Wildlife Victoria relies solely on donations from the public as well as the help of voluntary staff to keep afloat. She knows that “we’re all in this together.”

But financial drawbacks did not dampen her spirits during the Black Saturday bushfires last year. Garratt and a team from Help For Wildlife were some of the first aides on the scene at the Kinglake complex. “All of the food that we gave out to the animals in the fires I funded myself,” she says. “Some medical supplies were donated, but most of the cost we bore ourselves. We didn’t get very many donations for the fires because nobody really knew we were doing it.”

With the help of other shelters, Help For Wildlife distributed 70 tonnes of food and supplies to those in need, including dog and cat food, horse rugs, hay, horse food and human food, all the way from Kilmore to Gippsland.

“We were inundated,” she says. “Everybody did what they could, when they could and how they could.”

In the midst of the chaos, Garratt did not have any time to seek donations, which proved to be especially difficult when she ran out of medical supplies. Medical supplies, she noted, were distributed poorly during the bushfires.

“Some people got a lot, some people got none and some people didn’t know where it was,” she says. Fortunately, aid did arrive from interstate. The International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) sent down a specialist burns vet and an international relief coordinator from New South Wales.

Bob Irwin, animal conservationist and father of the late Steve Irwin, and other wildlife workers in Queensland also contributed what they could. “They were the wind beneath our very charred wings,” Garratt says.

In spite of all the difficulties she is confronted with in running Help For Wildlife and rehabilitating kangaroos, she wouldn’t trade her job for anything else in the world. “I find I’m constantly humbled with the privilege of being able to have access to them,” she says.

Despite financial obstacles, Garratt continues her fight to help Australia's native animals. Image: Priska3

Fellow wildlife shelter owner and friend, Michele Philips, is equally passionate about the wildlife that she takes in.

“They’re my pride and joy,” she boasts, “I’ll give an animal every chance it needs, as long as it’s not suffering.”

Owner of the South Oakleigh Wildlife Shelter, Philips takes in smaller wildlife, including possums and a variety of birds. Her front yard is often dotted with cockatoos, magpies and lorikeets that she has rehabilitated and released in the past but insist on coming back to pay her a visit. “Every animal has its purpose and when humans interfere, it’s disastrous,” she says.

Although the injured wildlife she rescues require low maintenance, the cost of care does add up and like Garratt, the majority of funding comes from Philips’ own pocket. When she isn’t tending to her wildlife, she spends most of her time foraging for bottlebrush and eucalyptus branches to feed the animals and adorn the makeshift homes in her backyard. Her dirt-encrusted hands are testimony to the physical demands of her day job.

Unlike Garratt, Philips runs the shelter on her own, covering the cost of feeding, cleaning and rehabilitation with little help from the government, which, in her opinion, is less than adequate. “It’s up to me to get the money however I can,” she says.

Donations and council grants have helped Philips run the shelter, but are currently her only sources of income. Last year, she received grants of $800 from Moorabbin Kingston council and $2000 from Glen Eira council, however she has received nothing from her own council, Oakleigh-Monash. “Monash have got no allowance whatsoever for wildlife,” she says, “for me, $3000 is nothing.”

Only recently has the Government formally recognized the contribution of wildlife carers to animal welfare. Under the 2009/10 Wildlife Rehabilitators Grants Program, $400,000 will be made available as grants to rehabilitators for equipment and infrastructure over a two-year period. A further $150,000 will go into the development of an education program for wildlife rehabilitation.

Colleen Wood, manager of the Southern Ash Wildlife Shelter, can identify with Philips’ lack of funding, which made the bushfires all the more difficult to endure. “The only funding that we received during the fires was a $1000 grant that they allocated to any shelters or carers that had dealt with any wildlife… There were times when we could not access medical supplies. There were another four shelters that were completely destroyed, so we also took on the brunt of their animals. It was pretty horrendous. But you just deal with it.”

Among the wildlife in Wood’s care was Sam the Koala, who was put to sleep four months after contracting Chlamydia. But the legacy of Sam has inspired Wood to build a specialised rehabilitation centre for burns victims.

“What I’d like to do is build a proper burns unit and have it operate as a koala hospital,” she says. The centre, she says, will provide education for PhD students as well as train vets and carers to deal with burns.

“We certainly don’t have the funding to go through with it, but it’s something that will come to be and will drive me for the rest of my life,” she says.

A public fund has been established for the proposed koala hospital, which will allow Wood and her colleagues to access grants and public donations. Wood hopes to have the centre up and running in the next five to ten years.

Erika Tumambing is a student currently at Monash University in Melbourne.

In the second part of Anna Hager’s investigation, she looks at what is being done to cultivate the Bluefin tuna industry from near collapse.

Overfishing has left the tuna industry in ruin but attempts to cultivate the fish in captivity have fallen flat. Image: © OCEANA / Keith Ellenbogen

Recent moves to cut Southern Bluefin tuna (SBT) quotas due to overfishing could have detrimental effects on the local Australian fishing industry, which generates big money.

The fishing industry says that quota cuts are not based on current data and are therefore partly unjustified.

The Australian Southern Bluefin Industry Association (ASBTIA) says that before recent quota cuts, export of Southern Bluefin reached over $300 million per annum, generating over 5,000 jobs throughout Australia.

They also say that the tuna business is internationally competitive and critically important to the Eyre Peninsula’s economy – Australia’s fishing industry hub.

“Tuna is one of the largest seafood industries in Australia, so it was a major blow,” Jeffriess says.

“It meant substantial job losses, and future uncertainty. Tuna is by far the largest employer on the Eyre Peninsula, and the tuna industry had invested in new industries such as tourism. So the impact has been not just within the tuna industry, it has been felt by every part of the Eyre Peninsula economy.”

According to ASBTIA CEO Brian Jeffriess, the quota cut in 2009 for example was based on data up to 2006. This data included the effects of large-scale illegal catch from 1985 to 2006. But, with the 2008 to 2010 statistics available now, the data suggests a possible recovery of stock.

Fishermen in the area share this sentiment. Peter Dennis from Triplebay charters in Port Lincoln says that he has received reports from local fishermen of sightings of large schools of tuna around the Great Australian Bight in 2010.

“It seems to be a seasonal type of thing rather than stocks running down,” he says.

Because of improvement in the numbers of bluefin sighted in recent times, Dennis says fishermen in Port Lincoln are therefore not happy to accept trade bans and quota cuts.

“They weren’t happy with it of course. They are lobbying the government and trying to get some of the quota back because of the numbers of fish that have been sighted out there,” he says.

Glenn Sant from wildlife trade monitors, TRAFFIC also says that it is difficult for any industry to have to reduce the amount of fish it harvests and to still make money.

“The fact is though that unless the amount of catch is reduced overall in the fishery there will not be recovery of the stock” he says.

Despite increased efforts, no alternatives to wild fishing are currently available

In an effort to secure healthy tuna stocks for the future, countries around the world are attempting to breed bluefin tuna in captivity. However, the question is whether such a migratory species, that can grow up to sizes of 450kg, can be domesticated.

According to many scientists this will be near impossible but might be the only way to save the species, as our insatiable hunger for the expensive sushi and sashimi ingredient doesn’t appear to be subsiding.

Maria Jose Cornax from OCEANA in Spain says that at the current stage of research and knowledge available, bluefin tuna cannot be bred in captivity, at least not at commercial levels.

She says that breeding bluefin in captivity “is unsustainable due to the high percentage of fish protein they need to grow.”

Cornax says, “For fattening one kilogram of bluefin you need around 15 to 20 kilograms of other wild fish species [like] mackerel, squid and sardines.”

A further problem is that, in most cases, the ranching of tuna involves the catching of wild tuna and fattening them in cages.

“It’s worth clarifying that all farming referred to with bluefin tuna actually catches wild stock that is then fattened for the market. Hence they do not contribute to the rebuilding of stocks,” says Sant from TRAFFIC.

“Tuna farming is officially considered as a post-harvesting practice rather than one based in direct capture and thus avoids every regional and international rule set up to manage fisheries in the Mediterranean.”

Besides wild catches and tuna farming there has been another development,which aims to rescue the tuna industry from collapse.

Last year in a world-first breakthrough, aquaculture pioneer Clean Seas Tuna Limited in conjunction with scientists from the University of the Sunshine Coast, the South Australian Research and Development Institute, the Fisheries Research and Development Corporation and the Australian Seafood Cooperative Research Centre successfully recreated the breeding patterns of the Southern Bluefin breed of tuna.

“Not only have images such as these never been seen by human eyes, but the creation of these fish has been entirely dependent on human endeavour,” says Clean Seas chairman Hagen Stehr.

In 2010 Clean Seas reports that it has completed its third consecutive annual on-shore Southern Bluefin Tuna spawning program.

“The 2009-10 spawning trials have proved to be highly successful in terms of being able to repeat spawning under controlled conditions; advance spawning commencement by two months from March to January; replicate our success in rearing fingerlings in locations up to 2,900 kilometres from Arno Bay; and extending the spawning period by six weeks to 12 weeks,” says Clean Seas managing director Clifford Ashby.

But, despite these efforts to breed bluefin tuna in captivity there is no indication at this stage of any contribution to rebuilding stocks now or in the near future.

“The bluefin tuna species has a biology that means that they are very easily overfished. That has to do with how long they live and how long they take to mature. In captivity that is very difficult too. In trade we don’t see bluefin that has been bred in captivity,” says Sant from TRAFFIC.

The verdict looks all but rosy

The problem is that with bluefin tuna fetching around $800 US per kilo on the Japanese market, the disappearance of this species in our oceans comes to no surprise.

Unfortunately dropping levels only seems to spark demand, with prices rising at an astronomic rate.

As of January 2010, a comprehensive global Catch Documentation has been implemented by the Commission for Conservation of Southern Bluefin Tuna (CCSBT).

“All whole SBT must be tagged at the time of kill with a uniquely numbered tag and the tag must remain on the SBT until the first point of domestic sale. SBT without tags between these points must not be accepted,” says Bob Kennedy from the CCSBT.

The sad reality is that bluefin tuna is only an example of where we are driving our oceans. According to Cornax, 90 per cent of our predators have already disappeared, so it is not only a matter of losing fish on our table.

“A Spanish researcher said that biodiversity is like a plane. Will it be able to fly when it is constantly losing small pieces of its engine?”

Read part one of Anna Hager‘s investigation, Why is the tuna industry so blue? here.