Illegal sea slugs and undersea webcams

This week in ocean news

Posted by Andrew Sharpless (Guest Contributor) at 2:42 PM on 21 Sep 2007

Read more about: oceans | fishing | wildlife | endangered species | water pollution

the European Union closed the bluefin tuna fishing season in the eastern Atlantic and Mediterranean, calling the stocks "exhausted" ...
a developer proposed dredging up 2.6 million cubic yards of sand from the ocean floor in order to build an artificial beach in Nantucket. The developer will replace the 105 acres of seabed habitat with 28,000 concrete railroad ties over 60 acres ...
A New York coastal manager told the state government that its 3,200 miles of coastline were in danger from pollution and overfishing. "New York was born on the waterfront, and its future depends on managing those resources," he said ...
Australian authorities detained 61 crew members of six illegal fishing boats. A catch of trepang, a sea slug, was found on board one of the ships. It was thrown back into the water ...

federal officials proposed dumping "cleaner materials" on top of the Mud Dump Site, a spot off the coast of New Jersey, where toxic mud was dumped throughout the 20th century. The idea is to create a muffin-shaped protective cover over what is now essentially a pollution pancake ...
researchers working in an undersea lab in Florida's coral reefs put up a series of webcams, allowing viewers to watch the interior of the lab or get a diver's-eye view with a camera mounted to scuba gear ...
the Pacific nation of Tuvalu appealed to the world to combat global warming. The island nation rests two meters above sea level and could disappear in the next 50 years as water levels rise ...
experts were puzzled by the second stranding of a thresher shark on a New York beach in as many weeks ...
for the first time since last year, striped bass migrated from the ocean to San Pablo Bay in California. Historically, the bass come every spring. No one knows why they are late this year ...
a 78-foot-long, 100,000 lb. blue whale carcass washed up on a beach near Ventura, California. The cause of death is unknown. The carcass will be towed to a nearby RV camping ground for inspection. "There will be some unhappy campers, as they say," a county official said ...
and Sen. Barbara Boxer cooed over Ted Danson's decades-long dedication to oceans advocacy. The exchange took place in a new episode of "Curb Your Enthusiasm."

For story: Illegal sea slugs and undersea webcams
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EU; Nantucket; "Rise, Ye Sea Slugs!"

First this:

It is good news, I guess, though it is in the context of discouraging circumstances, that the Europeans are showing restraint by closing their bluefin tuna fisheries. Curiously, the French and the Italians, with whom our friends at Oceana have had some dealings, seem to have taken the lead.

Then this:

More good news, from Nantucket: Fishermen and environmentalists are actually cooperating, and find themselves on the same side, i.e. opposed to the plan to replace a not-yet-but-maybe-soon dredged-up cobbled section of ocean floor with some inappropriate concrete railroad ties.

Finally this:

The trepang is not a sea slug at all; it is a sea cucumber. Sea slugs are nudibranchs, a kind of gastropod mollusk, closely related to snails. Sea cucumbers belong to a totally different phylum, the Echinoderms, specifically the Class Holothuroidea, which makes them ancient cousins of starfish (Asteroidea) and sea urchins (Echinoidea). Trepangs seem to be popular in Southeast Asian cuisine; and possibly the inaccurate designation "sea slug" can be traced to an English mistranslation of what they are called in Japanese. Here is a paragraph from the Wikipedia article "sea cucumber":

<<
Sea cucumbers have also inspired thousands of haiku in Japan, where they are called "namako" (fif}fR), written with characters that can be translated "sea mice". In English translations of these haiku, they are usually called "sea slugs"; there is a book with almost 1000 holothurian haiku translated from Japanese titled "Rise, Ye Sea Slugs!" by Robin D. Gill (ISBN 0-9742618-0-7). According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the "sea slug" is a holothurian first, but biologists insist on using "sea slug" only for the nudibranch, a marine-dwelling relative of land slugs.
>>

Which just goes to show, you have to take even the Oxford English Dictionary with a grain of salt.

"Rise, Ye Sea Slugs!" must surely deserve a prize for Best Weird Book Title That Is Totally Free Of Irony.

It is not clear why the Australians dumped the catch of trepangs. Are trepangs an endangered species? Would trepangs be a dangerous invasive species, were they to be introduced to Australian coastal waters? Or were the Australians just punishing the illegal fishermen?

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.

by caniscandida at 9:55 PM on 21 Sep 2007

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