|
Каспинфо март 2004 |
|
Название: ЭКОЛОГИЧЕСКИЕ ПРОБЛЕМЫ (на англ.яз) Главные Пункты: * Подборка статей в западных СМИ о предпринимаемых попытках решения экологических проблем, вызванных вселением гребневика Мнемиопсис в Каспийское море. * У туркменского побережья все активнее развивается браконьерский лов осетровых. (10.03.2004) Полный Текст ЭКОЛОГИЧЕСКИЕ ПРОБЛЕМЫ (на англ.яз) ЭКОЛОГИЧЕСКИЕ ПРОБЛЕМЫ (на англ.яз) *** Attack of the killer jellyfish. By Fred Pearce. 10 March 2004 The Independent - London (c) 2004 Independent Newspapers (UK) Limited . All rights reserved. A ship-born alien that played havoc with the ecosystem of the Black Sea is now threatening the neighbouring Caspian. They call it an ecological terrorist and "the blob that ate the Black Sea". Now the world's most dangerous alien species, a jellyfish about the size of your hand, is invading the Caspian Sea, where the region's scientists last week proposed setting another equally voracious jellyfish to gobble it up. Welcome to the biological equivalent of the war on terror. Mnemiopsis leidyi is an opaque comb jellyfish. The comb jellyfish is like an ordinary jellyfish, but without the sting. It comes from the backwaters of the US eastern seaboard, all the way from Massachusetts to Florida, where it once lived modestly enough, grazing on plankton, while being kept in check by countless jellyfish-eating species. But two decades ago it entered the Black Sea, probably hitch-hiking in a ship's ballast water. There it found abundant food and no predators. It munched its way through the eggs and larvae of a wide variety of fish, while consuming the plankton on which other fish fed. A self-fertilising hermaphrodite, Mnemiopsis breeds as fast as it eats. It reaches maturity within two weeks and then produces 8,000 eggs daily. Its appetite is so great that it can double its size in a day. By 1990, its total biomass in the Black Sea had reached an estimate 900 million tonnes, 10 times the annual fish catch from all the world's oceans. One snorkelling marine biologist from the Ukraine, Yu Zaitsev, calculated that there were 500 of the beasts in a single cubic metre of water in Odessa Bay. There was almost more jellyfish than water. Meanwhile, fish catches across the Black Sea had declined by 90 per cent. The valuable anchovy virtually disappeared. It was like a plague of locusts on the land. But unlike locusts, the jellyfish did not seem to eat itself out. Its population stayed steady, until another comb jellyfish showed up - again, probably in ballast water from the US. Beroe ovata has a rather more strict diet than its cousin Mnemiopsis. It likes eating its cousin. A sac-like creature, it simply opens itself up to its full extent and gobbles its close relative in one go. Beroe ovata arrived in 1997. Almost immediately, the Mnemiopsis population in the Black Sea began to decline. Crisis over? Not exactly. For Mnemiopsis went on its travels again. In 1999, the gelatinous monster showed up further east again, in the Caspian Sea. Just a few arrived at first, around where the Volga-Don canal, which links the two seas, enters the Caspian. They either swam up the canal or, more likely, hitch-hiked again in the bilges of ships on the canal. And once again, the jellyfish found it had plenty of food and no predators. The waters of the Caspian Sea are shared between Iran, on its southern shore, Russia and three former Soviet states: Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan. And in the past five years, each nation has seen its fishing stocks collapse by 50 per cent or more as the alien has spread. Whole fishing communities along the shores of the world's largest inland sea have been devastated. Hardest hit are stocks of the anchovy-like kilka fish. But that's not all. For the kilka, besides being the staple of local fishermen, is also the preferred food of the sea's indigenous seal, as well as of the famed beluga sturgeon, source of most of the world's caviar. Both species are "under significant threat" from the invader, says Hossein Negarestan, the head of marine ecology at the Iranian Fisheries Research Organisation in Teheran. The seals are already reeling from repeated epidemics of distemper in the past decade, and the sturgeon have been hit by a mafia-sponsored orgy of illegal fishing. According to Negarestan, "the impact of Mnemiopsis on the Caspian Sea ecosystem may be much worse than in the Black Sea." And any threat to the local caviar trade is a threat to the entire regional economy. But during five-nation talks on the future of the Caspian region, held at the end of last month in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, ministers heard the results of a meeting of their fisheries scientists in Teheran a few days earlier, which had proposed breeding and releasing Beroe ovata in an attempt to control the invader. According to Negarestan, his researchers have been experimenting for more than two years with breeding the predator and acclimatising it to the less salty waters of the landlocked Caspian Sea. The trick, they say, is to breed it in salty water and then move the offspring into tanks containing ever less salty water over a period of a few weeks, until they are used to their new environment. Then the offspring can be released into the Caspian Sea, ready to be deployed as a "bioweapon". "Beroe ovata only preys on comb jellyfish, and the only comb jellyfish in the Black Sea are the invading Mnemiopsis," Negarestan says. "It would be an ideal biological control agent. And we have established that there is no risk of transfer of bacteria or parasites to the Caspian with Beroe ovata." Once Mnemiopsis has gone, be believes, Beroe will simply die out. The spread of Mnemiopsis is one of the most startling cases of the global spread of alien species - most of which hitch-hike one way or another with travelling humans. Taken out of their natural environment, many aliens swiftly die off, consumed by predators against which they have no defence. But some find greener pastures. And without predators, there is nothing except a limit on their food supply to prevent their proliferation. There are famous cases of alien species being deliberately released by humans. Fish such as the Nile perch and trees such as the Australian eucalyptus are ubiquitous. Australia is also famous for being populated by other peoples' species, not least the humble rabbit. Many of the most voracious aliens were introduced to combat other aliens. The poisonous cane toad, currently proliferating in the wilderness of northern Australia, was introduced 70 years ago to eat the grubs of the cane beetle, then infesting sugar-cane crops. Botanists and gardeners took the water hyacinth, a pretty but voracious water-weed native of Brazil, across the world for display. But it escaped, and today is choking canals, lakes and harbours in 50 countries. East Africa's giant Lake Victoria has been all but covered by the weed in some years. In South Africa, they are currently clearing huge areas of non-native trees that are soaking up the country's scarce underground water supplies. Hundreds of tropical islands have been stripped of their ground-nesting birds, thanks to rats that jumped ship during colonial times. The brown tree snake has wrecked ecosystems, terrorised human beings and eaten its way through countless power lines in Guam since the reptile hopped to the islands aboard US military aircraft in the 1950s. And 18 months ago, just before the Gulf War, US troops halted military preparations on their Indian Ocean base at Diego Garcia to erect a snake-proof fence round the airfield, after fears that a brown tree snake had hitched a ride there from Guam. And Britain has not escaped the alien invasion, either. We have suffered from an influx of Japanese knotweed, the Colorado beetle, the ruddy duck and the grey squirrel. The spread of the hedgehog through the Outer Hebrides in the past 30 years has triggered a succession of crises for its island bird populations. Some scientists call the invasion of alien species a bigger threat to the planet's biodiversity than any human activity. But not everyone is quite so opposed to the aliens in our midst. Where would Britain be without them? asks the naturalist Richard Mabey. He says that we should welcome the diversity that they bring to our landscape. According to the Wildflower Society, two thirds of our wild flowering plants are aliens, many of them semi-tropical imports that hopped over the fence from suburban gardens and are now establishing themselves in the wild. And some people don't even like the term "aliens". The US social scientist Betsy Hartmann of the Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, says: "The ideas of ecologists about aliens sound so similar to anti-immigration rhetoric. Green themes such as scarcity and purity and invasion all have right-wing echoes. Hitler's ideas about environmentalism came out of the idea of purity, after all." It may be little consolation to the fishermen of the Caspian Sea. But perhaps we should spare a thought for the aliens, after all. THE BLOB THAT ATE THE BLACK SEA Mnemiopsis leidyi was first recorded in the Black Sea in the 1980s, where it has no native predators. It radically affected the pelagic ecosystem, achieving enormous biomass levels (up to 1.5 to 2kg m-2 in the summer of 1989). The jellyfish has had a huge impact on populations of anchovy (Engraulis encrasicolus) and kilka (Clupeonella spp.), which provide food for the beluga sturgeon (below). Beluga caviar is crucial to the health of the local economy. Mnemiopsis was first reported in the Caspian Sea in 1999, having migrated through the Don-Volga canal in ships' ballast water. To control the problem, scientists propose introducing another comb jellyfish, Beroe ovata, which has a very specific diet: Mnemiopsis. *** Headline: Environmental peacemaking Byline: Mark Clayton Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor Date: 03/04/2004 Last month, Iran, Russia, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, and Kazakhstan declared war ... on the jellyfish. A particularly voracious species known as Mnemiopsis is munching happily on phytoplankton in the Caspian Sea, the building block for the sea's valuable fish stocks. As a result, they're wiping out sturgeon and every other type of fish. None of the five nations wants to see a repeat of what happened a few years ago in the Black Sea, when the Mnemiopsis biomass - like the blob that ate New York in a long-ago B-movie - grew larger than the world's entire commercial fish catch. So the Caspian countries, spurred by their common jellyfish enemy, are coordinating under the umbrella of the Caspian Environment Program. A five-year-old cooperative project to clean up the Caspian, the CEP has made some significant headway as well as willing partners out of feisty competitors. Environmental problems that cross borders have often raised tensions between nations. But a new generation of scholars and activists see in these problems an opportunity to bring nations closer together. They even have a name for it: environmental peacemaking. From disputed territory between Peru and Ecuador to the China-Vietnam border, hot spots that could trigger war instead have shown potential to bring peace. Big political challenges persist, of course. But advocates of environmental peacemaking point to a growing body of evidence that shows that working together to save the environment can begin to make peaceful neighbors of once-feisty nations. "Environmental peacemaking is a reaction to the overwhelmingly negative focus on environmental conflict," says Geoffrey Dabelko, director of the Environmental Change and Security Project at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. "The focus has been on the glass half empty. We need to focus on how can we harness the environment, be more proactive - turn the whole issue on its head." When it comes, for example, to who gets the rich oil deposits under the Caspian, the five nations that border it are still fierce rivals. But when it comes to the sea's environmental quality, they are quickly learning to bury the hatchet and work together. The Caspian's problems are enormous. Even before the Mnemiopsis came to the Caspian in ship ballast water through the Volga River, oil slicks, sewage, and overfishing threatened to kill the region's valuable fish stocks on which all five nations rely. Now the jellyfish are rapidly taking over. Just two inches long, Mnemiopsis reproduces quickly - about 8,000 young every day. "The environmental challenge in the Caspian really has brought these governments together," says Mary Matthews, an environmental consultant currently working on the cleanup. "Sure, there are some serious problems, but there's also new hope for the Caspian." While not new, environmental peacekeeping has been neglected for years by researchers and activists in the field of environmental security. Now, that's starting to change. "One reason we're seeing a lot more interest in this idea now is that the optimism of the early 1990s around the Rio Earth Summit has really waned," says Ken Conca, director of the Harrison Program on the Future Global Agenda at the University of Maryland in College Park. "It's increasingly clear that broadly global and formally institutional intergovernment cooperation will not be forthcoming anytime soon. So people at the grass roots are looking for more practical approaches on a more regional rather than global scale." That includes "peace parks," often created in transboundary areas with ecological significance. The number of transboundary protected areas, including peace parks, more than doubled from 59 in 1988 to 169 in 2001 in 113 countries, according to the World Commission on Protected Areas. While many such parks are, like laurel wreaths, bestowed only after hostilities cease - in a growing number of instances the parks are themselves the catalyst for peace. In 1998, for example, Peru and Ecuador established Cordillera del Condor Peace Transborder Reserve in a section of rain forest. Where for decades the two nations had fired periodic artillery barrages at each another along this disputed section of border land, the two now comanage a park. That success encourages activist academics like Saleem Hassan Ali, a political scientist at the University of Vermont at Burlington. As this year marks the 50th anniversary of the first scaling of the fearsome mountain K2, by an Italian team, Professor Ali and other researchers along with activist groups are pushing India, Pakistan, and China to establish a peace park in the Karakoram area around it. The plan would involve a comanaged park that would draw ecotourists, but still protect the snow leopard, Marco Polo sheep, and Tibetan gazelle. That might seem a long shot to some, except that transboundary parks are popping up like mushrooms in Africa among nations [see related story left] that not long ago were shooting at one another. Not all parks are on a glide path, however. Since the war ended in 1953, the narrow 115-mile-long demilitarized zone between the two Koreas has undergone a radical transformation. Although it's the most heavily mined area in the world, the DMZ has become a tranquil Eden. Untrammeled by man for more than 50 years, the zone between the razor wire has seen idle rice paddies morph into wetlands, now home to rare birds and small animals like the red-crowned crane and yellow-necked marten. Anything not large enough to trigger a land mine can call it home. Just a few years ago, warming relations between North and South Korea brought calls for the DMZ to be turned into a UNESCO world biosphere preserve. Now, with tensions rising over North Korea's nuclear problem, the idea has ground to a halt. "This is something that groups in South Korea would very much like to see - and they're pushing for it," says Esook Yoon, a political scientist at Kent State University in Ohio. "Ideally they want to do that, expand it to a peacemaking process. But because of the standoff over nuclear materials this process is stuck right now." Similarly, a push by the Friends of the Earth Middle East (FOEME) to get Jordan, Israel, and the Palestinian Authority to cooperate in piping Red Sea water into the dying Dead Sea has been at an impasse since renewed hostilities. Diversion of rivers flowing into the world's saltiest body of water has caused it to fall from 1,280 feet below sea level to more than 1,360 feet below sea level in the past 50 years - evaporating to just a third of its former size. An $800 million pipeline from the Red Sea to the Dead Sea would help restore the sea, eliminate sink holes, and encourage tourism. "The project is presently stuck," Gidon Bromberg, an FOEME activist, comments in an e-mail. "I think the project, though, is far from dead and that the parties will find the language to move forward." Despite severe obstacles, some working examples of environmental peacemaking are popping up in unexpected corners of the world. Today the highway corridor connecting China and Vietnam, bitter enemies for centuries, is still the largest conduit for smuggled wildlife in the world. Trucks filled with sacks of snakes, turtles, pangolin, mongoose, and civet cats flowed across the border into China, recalls Tom Dillon of the World Wildlife Fund, who worked on halting such smuggling. For years China had seemed relatively unconcerned, while Vietnam was furious over losing its wildlife. But in the past year, the two nations have begun working much more closely on enforcement measures to stem the tide of Vietnamese and Laotian wildlife smuggling, Mr. Dillon says. He predicts more progress this fall when talks under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, in Bangkok, ratchet up the pressure on China and others nations. "As the SARS epidemic has revealed the link between the consumption of wildlife and public health, they've become much more serious about stemming use of wildlife in medicine and stopping the trade in these species," he says. In the long run these efforts will succeed more often than not, Dr. Matthews predicts. "There's not much in the way of political stakes, so if all fails there's not nearly the embarrassment there would be on a cooperative deal on the economy or military," she says. "The environment is just a nice soft-political backdoor way for countries to get along." Maybe that's why the US and Cuba, along with Mexico, have embarked on a new research program into the Gulf of Mexico ecosystem. It is thought that Gulf currents carry fish, lobster, and larvae of other species from Cuba and Mexico into US waters, and that sea turtles that nest on US beaches feed in Cuban waters. "Despite a chillier and chillier political climate between the US and Cuba, this set of research activities has been licensed by the US Treasury Department," says David Guggenheim, head of the newly formed Harte Research Institute for Gulf of Mexico Studies at Texas A&M University, in an e-mail. "We have gained support from the highest levels of government in Cuba." (c) Copyright 2004 The Christian Science Monitor. All rights reserved. *** WELCOME TO IWPR'S REPORTING CENTRAL ASIA, No. 269, March 05, 2004 TURKMENISTAN: STURGEON STOCKS ENDANGERED Poaching poses a serious threat to an increasingly depleted Caspian species. By Murad Novruzov in Ashgabat TURKMENISTAN: STURGEON STOCKS ENDANGERED Poaching poses a serious threat to an increasingly depleted Caspian species. By Murad Novruzov in Ashgabat Turkmen fishermen are knowingly contributing to the decline of the Caspian Sea's beluga sturgeon population through intensive poaching - because they claim they have no other way to feed their families. The fish, whose eggs are used to produce the delicacy caviar, may soon be declared an endangered species by the American government. Poaching is spiralling far out of control, and experts believe that stocks of the beluga - which takes 15 years to reach maturity and can live to be more than 100 - will be utterly depleted in as little as two years' time. It is estimated that sturgeon numbers have already fallen by 90 per cent in the past two decades. The fishermen are all too aware of the plight of the fish - but their own grim situation leaves little room for sympathy. Nicknamed "old sea dog" by his colleagues, Metin - his face is lined and burned by decades of wind, sun and salt - is the oldest fisherman in the area - which, he said, has seen better times. "During the Soviet era, when coastal fisheries were flourishing, it was a very honourable, brave and, most importantly, profitable profession for a man," he told IWPR. Waving a gnarled hand at the dilapidated buildings, discarded nets and rusting machinery littering the port, he continued, "Unfortunately, as you can see, everything is in decline. The fishery farm shut down, there is no work for us anymore, and we have to struggle to survive on our own. "One has to get a special license to fish, buy expensive equipment and, most importantly, we have to hand a large share of our catch to the local authorities. "That's why so many of us are involved in poaching. We understand well how dangerous it is, but we have to feed our children. To do this, we target the sturgeon as it is the most valuable. "We can't even imagine that one day there will be no more fish left in the sea, but poachers would not be solely to blame for that. Oil production harms the sea far more. It is mentioned only as a secondary problem though, because big money is involved. "As for the questions of ethics and morals, these are not proper arguments in a situation where the poor have to rob to feed themselves." Scientists began to warn about the threat to the sturgeon population as far back as the late Sixties, but it took three decades before an agreement was made to lower fishing quotas. Now Russia is entitled to the largest quota share, around three quarters, followed by Kazakstan, just under a fifth, and Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan, a little over a twentieth each. Nonetheless, plenty of sturgeon ends up on the stalls of Ashgabat fish markets - one is known to sell more than 200 kilos a day. The United States Fish & Wildlife Department is currently pondering whether to declare the beluga an endangered species, which would lead to a ban on the sale of its caviar in the US - where 25 per cent of the delicacy is consumed. This will help by decreasing the demand, but greater efforts have to be made by the Caspian nations themselves. The situation appears to have slipped out of the Turkmen authorities' control, in spite of the efforts of various inspection teams, police units and border troops to tackle poaching. Fishermen claim that the organisations responsible for protecting the fish are often very lenient towards the poachers - or are actively involved in the illegal fishing business themselves. "All these so-called fish protecting inspectorates are quite thoroughly corrupt," said one fisherman. "At the moment, several poaching brigades are working on the Turkmen coast of the Caspian. The coast guards are not only well aware of this - they are actually our clients and order fish and caviar from us." "It is a very profitable business," agreed a second fisherman. "Those who are not using our service simply charge us a fee and then close their eyes to our activity." Though caviar is one of the most expensive luxury products in the world, the Turkmen fishermen receive little for their catches. "They buy it for a song from us. By the time the caviar reaches the Ashgabat bazaar its price has gone up several times. So it turns out we are risking our lives just to make enough to feed our families and maybe repair our equipment," said another. "I can't afford to buy a new boat - and just ask my wife when our children last ate meat." Aina, a mother of four from the Turkmen port of Avaza, said, "We would really like to treat the children to something else, but here we eat whatever the catch brings us and can't afford anything else." Murad Novruzov is the pseudonym for journalist in Asghabat. ****************** VISIT IWPR ON-LINE: www.iwpr.net **************** IWPR's Reporting Central Asia provides the international community with a unique insiders' perspective on the region. Using our network of local journalists, the service publishes news and analysis from across Central Asia on a weekly basis. The service forms part of IWPR's Central Asia Project based in Almaty, Bishkek, Tashkent and London, which supports media development and encourages better local and international understanding of the region. IWPR's Reporting Central Asia is supported by the UK Community Fund. The service is published online in English and Russian. All our reporting services are also available via e-mail subscription. To subscribe visit: http://www.iwpr.net/sub_form.html For further details on this project and other information services and media programmes, visit IWPR's website: www.iwpr.net Editor-in-Chief: Anthony Borden; Managing Editor: Yigal Chazan; Senior Editor: John MacLeod; Editor: Alison Freebairn; Project Manager and Editor: Saule Mukhametrakhimova; Commissioning Editors: Chinara Jakypova in Bishkek, Eduard Poletaev and Dosym Satpaev in Almaty, Galima Bukharbaeva in Tashkent, Lidia Isamova in Dushanbe. To comment on this service, send a letter to the editor: letters@iwpr.net The Institute for War & Peace Reporting is a London-based independent non-profit organisation supporting regional media and democratic change. Lancaster House, 33 Islington High Street, London N1 9LH, United Kingdom. Tel: +44 (0)20 7713 7130; Fax: +44 (0)20 7713 7140. E-mail: info@iwpr.net Web: www.iwpr.net The opinions expressed in IWPR's Reporting Central Asia are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of the publication or of IWPR. ISSN: 1477-7924 Copyright (c) 2004 The Institute for War & Peace Reporting REPORTING CENTRAL ASIA No. 269 *** |