Dolphin-Safe But Not Ocean-Safeff

Source: Forbes Magazine, by Elisabeth Eaves

From “bird friendly” to “salmon safe,” today’s grocery shoppers face a barrage of labels claiming eco-friendliness. But as more and more of these tags hit our shelves, the scientific record shows that one of the earliest earth-friendly food labels does more environmental harm than good. The dolphin-safe tuna logo, found on any can of StarKist, Bumblebee or Chicken of the Sea, comes at an enormous cost to the ocean ecosystem.

The save-the-dolphins campaign that began in the 1970s initially met with huge success. It helped reduce dolphin deaths in the Eastern Tropical Pacific (ETP) from something well above a hundred thousand per year to just a few thousand by the mid-‘90s.

But today the consumer label that was the crowning achievement of the campaign has become a coverup for a high-seas scandal every bit as serious as the one it set out to stop. It sends a feel-good message to shoppers, while humans deplete tuna stocks just as they decimated once-plentiful stocks like cod. “The real problem is giving ourselves high fives for solving the tuna-dolphin problem when we’ve just created other problems,” says Timothy Essington, a marine scientist at the University of Washington.

To understand what went wrong, one has to understand the tuna-dolphin relationship in the first place.

An unusual phenomenon occurs in the ETP, an expanse of ocean stretching roughly from California to Peru, and as far west as Hawaii. Dolphins and yellowfin tuna travel together over thousands of miles, the former skipping along the surface and the latter jetting along underneath.

Noticing this strange behavior -which occurs in few other places in the world-fishermen in the ETP started looking for dolphins in order to find the profitable tuna. Until the middle of the last century, they put out lines with bait, which tempted the tuna but not the dolphins. In the 1950s, though, they started using purse seines--giant nets dropped into the ocean then drawn shut at the bottom and reeled aboard. Fishermen began “setting” on schools of dolphin, that is, encircling them in nylon nets as long as 1.5 kilometers (0.9 miles) and as deep as 200 meters (656 feet). They kept the lucrative tuna but discarded the dolphin.

The result was that by the 1970s, tuna fishing was killing dolphins in untold numbers. Good data from the era are scarce, but William Fox, a scientist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, estimates that mortality was in the hundreds of thousands per year. Flipper, the show about a boy and his friendly, intelligent dolphin, was on the air, tugging the U.S. public’s heart strings. Greenpeace launched a campaign to stop the slaughter, and the U.S. passed a series of laws, beginning with the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972 and culminating in 1990 with the Dolphin Protection Consumer Information Act. The Act created the “dolphin safe” label, to be used on cans of tuna caught without dolphin contact.

As the dolphin-safe campaign heated up--and even before the 1990 act took effect--American tuna boats began seeking alternatives to setting on dolphins. Most decamped to the Western and Central Pacific, where the dolphin concern was moot. In those regions today, tuna automatically gets the dolphin-safe seal of approval, whereas to earn the label in the ETP, boats must accept inspectors.

The impact of the shift was tremendous. Between 1986 and 1996, annual dolphin mortality as a result of tuna fishing fell from about 133,000 to close to 2,600, according to a paper by Martín Hall, a scientist with the Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission (IATTC). Prior to 1986, dolphin populations had been shrinking precipitously. By 1996, the level of mortality from tuna fishing was less than 0.1%, meaning that the population had stabilized.

Today, though, big-eye and yellowfin tuna are being overfished in the Western and Central Pacific--meaning that at current consumption levels, their populations will continue to steadily shrink. The estimated total catch in the Western and Central Pacific has increased by nearly 50% since 1990, with 2.022 million metric tons caught in 2004. While skipjack tuna makes up the bulk of the catch, the imperiled yellowfin and big-eye--24% and 5% of the catch, respectively--fetch more at market.

Globally, tuna consumption has increased from less than 0.6 million tons in 1950 to nearly six million today, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization, with more than two-thirds of the main catches coming from the Pacific. Feeding that global appetite comes at a high price--not just in tuna, but in other species too.

When American fleets stopped fishing on dolphins, they needed another way to find schools of tuna. They turned to so-called fish aggregation devices, or FADs.

The first FADs originated as logs. A palm tree would fall into the ocean in a storm. Over many months, it would attract marine life -plankton and seaweed and fish of all sorts, including -ka-ching!-tuna. Fishermen simply dropped a net on one of these logs and pulled up the entire thing.

Soon, fishermen realized that they didn’t have to rely on fallen logs and started making their own FADs out of rafts and ropes. They put electronic tracking devices on them and returned after enough sea life had accumulated.

Among boats selling their catches to U.S. tuna canneries--and earning the dolphin-safe label--FAD fishing is now common. But FAD fishing, while reducing dolphin mortality to just about zero, takes a huge “bycatch,” the industry term for unwanted species caught up in the nets and killed.

Hall’s study found that for each 1,000 metric tons of yellowfin tuna caught in FAD sets over three years, fishermen caught nearly 111,000 other individual fish, including sharks, rays, marlins and sea turtles--several varieties of which are endangered.

The fishermen also caught, per 1,000 metric tons of the target catch, 189 metric tons of yellowfin that they discarded as too small--meaning the fish were juveniles killed before reproducing. Catching the young fish contributes to population decline.

Sets on dolphin over the same period took only 475 fish as bycatch per 1,000 metric tons of the target catch, plus only 8.7 metric tons of juvenile yellowfin. In other words, dropping a net on a FAD is some 230 times more harmful to the general fish population than dropping a net on a school of dolphins -and contributes more to the decline of the yellowfin.

“Obviously, from an ecological point of view, sets on dolphins are the best way to harvest yellowfin tuna,” Hall wrote.

Meanwhile, dolphin-sets have been getting safer for dolphins. Under pressure from the Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission, and wanting to gain access to the U.S. market, fishermen developed ways to reduce dolphin deaths. A “backdown maneuver”--backing up the boat after encircling the school, which causes one end of the net to sink--allows dolphins, which swim near the surface, to break free. Panels of net with smaller mesh were introduced so that dolphins wouldn’t get their snouts caught. Rafts were sent out, sometimes along with swimmers, to hand-rescue entangled creatures. Speedboats were used to keep nets from collapsing and trapping bycatch, and floodlights introduced at night to avoid mistakes. With these tactics, along with training and inspections from the IATTC, fishermen reduced dolphin kills in the ETP to just 1,400 in 1999.

As mortality decreased among fleets, like Mexico’s, that still fished on dolphins, Congress prepared to allow them the coveted dolphin-safe label. Greenpeace, the World Wildlife Fund and the Center for Marine Conservation all supported the legal change, seeing it as a reward for good behavior, and not wanting to turn Mexican fishermen back to their old ways.

Foreign fleets were elated-until the Earth Island Institute brought a lawsuit against the U.S. federal government seeking to halt the change. The government lost on appeal in 2007.

The dolphin-safe campaign, meanwhile, spawned many more consumer labeling crusades. “It showed that consumers could make a big environmental change, and it set precedents that have been used in the U.S., Europe and around the world,” says Dave Phillips, director of the international marine mammal project at the Earth Island Institute.

Today the watchdog publication Consumer Reports tracks and evaluates 146 earth-friendly tags on our food, toiletries, and home cleaning products. But the chain of events leading to the dolphin safe label was, in marine biologist Essington’s words, “definitely outside the realm of science.” Getting humans to identify with a big, friendly-looking animal is a classic environmentalist strategy, but not necessarily one that takes the whole ecosystem into account. Buyer beware.