>>Winnie Lam: Hello everyone.
Iím Winnie Lam.
Thank you so much for attending this talk about oceans.
We have two esteemed scientists here with us from the Wildlife Conservation Society
whoís gonna tell us about our oceans.
Weíve got Claudio Campagna, Doctor Claudio Campagna, and, um, Dr. Caleb McClennon both
from the Wildlife Conservation Society.
Dr. Claudio Campagna is the leading scientist of the Wildlife Conservation Societyís Patagonian
Sea Program.
He specializes in the biology and conservation of marine mammals.
In addition to having published five books and 60 scientific papers, heís also been
the scientific advisor for the BBC and the National Geographic Channel.
Heís gonna talk to us about our oceans.
And Dr. Caleb McClennon is the Marine Conservation Director at the Wildlife Conservation Society.
He works on improving our fisheries management globally so that we can conserve marine biodiversity
worldwide.
And for those of you who are here to hear about the trip to Belize, heís gonna talk
to us about that.
So without further ado letís give a very warm welcome to our guests, Dr. Claudio Campagna
and Dr. Caleb McClennon.
>>Caleb McClennon: Thank you, Winnie, and thanks everyone for taking some time out of
your busy day to be here with us.
So, as Winnie mentioned, weíre gonna go through a bit of some of the most fascinating places
in the worldís oceans today, some of the challenges we face and then some stories of
hope that where weíre working and other people are working to make a significant difference
in improving the health of the oceans.
And we wanna focus, specifically, on the Patagonian Sea, a place where Claudio has spent close
to 30 years of his life working to help, to help save and with remarkable progress and
I think really an inspiration to all of us that we can make a big difference out there.
And then finally Iíll close with just a short summary of this opportunity that we have to
host some volunteers in a Glover's Reef Research Station in Belize and provide you a bit more
details about that opportunity and then weíll have some time for questions.
So thank you all and itís really a pleasure to be here at Google.
So, when we think about the oceans and what drew you here or what inspires people to think
about caring about our seas.
Everyone has some sort of image like this in their heads.
For me this is diving, actually at Glover's Reef in Belize with two different species,
a Bottlenose and a Beak dolphin, swam side by side next to me and just blow your mind
away in terms of taking you away from humanity and bringing you into the sea.
So all of you probably, from some part of your life, have your own image like this where
youíve connected individually on a personal level with some species in the sea.
And if you havenít, it will happen and it will really be fantastic.
So thereís these moments that are inspirational, thereís also vast ocean ecosystems that have
tremendous biodiversity.
This is from Bunaken Reserve in the heart of the coral triangle where you have 600 species
of coral reef, 3,000 species of reef fish.
For people who have been there and have seen it, itís like no other place on the planet.
Itís the center, the center of origin for marine biodiversity on the planet, a place
that is beyond comparison.
This is in the center of Indonesia in the IndoPacific coral triangle.
So the oceans have this fantastic biodiversity, this fantastic wildlife, these incredibly
important ecosystems but as we know, the oceans are also critically important for the livelihoods
of tens of millions of people around the world.
They provide critical seafood for over a billion people on the planet.
Ninety percent of fishermen living on the planet are depending on oceans in small scale
aspects like these.
These are two fishermen off the coast of Madagascar, living on one or two dollars a day, 100 percent
protein for their families is coming from the sea.
So the sea is not just some fantastic aspect of biodiversity for us to go to vacation to
and see, but is an elemental part of coastal livelihoods throughout the world.
And this is really an important essence of the oceans to also remember.
So when, on the other side of fishing from the sea, thereís also as we know, and probably
people have heard far too much about, the over-fishing crisis that we face on the planet.
We have trawlers, trawling in very close to the shore line in places that have almost
no rules, taking in bycatch of marine turtles and dolphins and over harvesting too many
species without any sort of regulations.
We are now importing far more seafood from the developing world than we produce in the
developed world.
We are inadequately managing our fisheries and taking them from places we have no idea
with the population structure, how much fish we could possibly take out of the ocean.
So thereís a significant challenge that is the industrial scale fisheries that are increasingly
moving into resource-poor and governance -poor places.
An articulation of this is the crisis we face with shark finning and shark fisheries today.
We woke up to the whales in the early part of last century and we started an international
commitment to saving the great whales on this planet.
As a result, around the world whale populations are rebounding.
In 1970s, we woke up to sea turtles and as a result many sea turtle populations around
the world are rebounding.
Today, weíre waking up to the shark finning crisis.
WCS research that we had done in the last decade indicates that between 40 and 70 million
sharks are taken, a year, from our oceans.
Almost none of the shark populations are assessed, almost none of these fisheries are controlled.
This is a species crisis in the oceans of our day.
As we, as was articulated two summers ago, oil and gas extraction and is moving, has
moved into the Gulf of Mexico and is now moving off shore to a number of countries around
the world.
This is a National Geographic map of oil infrastructure in the Gulf moving out to about 150 miles.
This is physical infrastructure in the ocean.
When you look out in the ocean off the coast of California, you see almost none of this
physical infrastructure because thereís moratorium in oil drilling.
The Gulf of Mexico is a very different story and the waters of a lot of countries around
the world is a very different story in terms of oil exploration This is changing the way
we think of the oceans.
Weíre thinking about it as a space; a space to be used and a space to be managed in a
way that we only thought of possible on land before.
In some places, the rule of law for the oceans is also incredibly challenging; such that
people are using dynamite still to fish or to collect coastal aggregate materials for
construction.
This is a photo I took in the Marshall Islands, where I lived for four years working for their
government, where theyíre still using reef resources for mining materials because there
is no other resources for construction materials.
So the physical use of near shore reefs is another significant challenge we face.
And then finally, as we all have heard from many different angles, but we cannot mention
the oceans without describing the situation of climate change and its impact to the oceans.
This is a reef in Aceh in Indonesia a year ago prior to, a year and a half ago, prior
to the bleaching event that bleached out 100 percent of certain species of corals, in a
site where we worked.
So the white is what happens to corals when all their symbiotic algae is expelled and
if the temperatures do not decrease after a few weeks, the corals die, and thatís what
has happened in Indonesia.
It happened in a lot of places around the world when temperatures were elevated.
So, like many ecosystems, the global impact on climate change is also a considerable challenge.
This all being said, there is significant hope in the oceans like there has not been
before.
There is a changing mindset in people and in countries around the world to try to find
a way to better protect, better manage your fisheries, expand protected areas out in the
oceans, ensure smart growth as opposed to unregulated growth of extractive industries
and invest significantly more into scientific research and understanding of the vast waters
of our planet.
Weíve invested a lot of money and time in understanding domestic waters of the US.
And now a lot of that is changing to expand throughout the world.
Just to point you out a bit of where we focus is that thereís three centers of marine biodiversity
in the planet.
Basically the western edge of ocean basins, so the western edge of the Atlantic is the
Caribbean, western edge of the Indian, the western Indian Ocean and the western edge
of the Pacific Ocean, these are the hearts of marine biodiversity.
Areas that are generally very nutrient poor but have vast coral reef resources.
So these places are, in a planet that is covered 72 percent by ocean, some of the most critical
places to work to expand in protected areas and improving fisheries.
There are also some places, again, along the coast, where the greatest amount of productivity
is happening on the oceans, where 90 percent of marine life is existing in the coastal
zone and you have huge aggregations of coastal wildlife.
The Congo basin coast in Central Africa has the worldís largest population of Leatherback
Sea Turtles.
For folks that have seen Leatherbacks, theyíre talking 9 feet long, these creatures that
are extremely vulnerable, the last, the largest population in the planet lives here and is
doing very well.
The Bay of Bengal has the worldís largest population of Irrawaddy river dolphins and
coastal cetaceans . But the government of Bangladesh, one of
the poorest countries on the planet, just put in a protected area to protect a whole
slew of the population of river dolphins that is bigger by a factor of ten than any other
population on the planet.
And in the Arctic, between Alaska and Russia, which is experiencing incredible impacts from
climate change and receding of ice, there was an effort to continue to protect walrus
populations, ice seals to manage through this change and the indigenous communities that
actually depend on these resources to stay alive.
And then finally the Patagonia Coast where Claudio and a number of people who work for
him and partner with him are protecting the largest continental population of Southern
elephant seals, penguins, albatross, in a way, in protecting and restoring that abundance
in a way that is unprecedented around the planet.
So there is incredible hope and incredible demonstrated success of places where weíre
improving the health of the oceans and saving a number of species and ecosystems.
Iím just gonna close with a few slides.
Some narrow slices of anecdotes that I think are quite interesting.
These are several of our Indonesian staff working together with some fisherman in Indonesia
that previously had used cyanide to fish for the live reef fish trade; to take reef fish
out and bring them to restaurants still living like we do with lobster.
And itís just a delicacy in East Asia.
We worked with them to halt the cyanide fishing in exchange to pilot some agriculture programs
where they can more sustainably produce what the market is demanding.
And as a result, they started managing their fisheries better, thereís no more cyanide
on the reef and the biodiversity and the number of fish is coming back out.
And theyíre economically doing better than they were doing when they were using cyanide
in the reef.
So a win win, economically for these fishers who are living on very few amounts of dollars
per day and also for the marine resource, critical in a place like Indonesia where you
have 200 million people living in an island country that is extremely small.
Thatís a photo from Belize.
These are Nassau Grouper which are critically threatened throughout the Caribbean.
Most of the spawning aggregations of Nassau Grouper have gone ecologically extinct in
the Caribbean because they come together to breed, and thatís a very easy time to fish
them.
In Belize, the government of Belize over the last thirty years protected all of the spawning
aggregations of Nassau Grouper and in some places such as Glover's Reef, weíve quadrupled
the spawning populations of Nassau Grouper as a result of protecting them where theyíre
spawning and also more smartly managing the fisheries in the areas where weíre not able
to protect that species alone.
So a significant bounce back of a species that we thought may go ecologically extinct
throughout the Caribbean because of the tremendous value.
And this, again, is taken at Glover's Reef, these are magnificent fish.
These are some guards working in Gabon in Africa.
Thereís a country in Central Africa, as I mentioned the worldís largest population
of Leatherback Sea Turtles.
The government of Gabon created, about 10 years ago created a significant network of
terrestrial protected areas to protect this terrestrial biodiversity.
And just now theyíre committing, on the same side, to create a large network of no-take
marine reserves in the waters, to protect marine species, to protect fisheries and to
ensure larger protection for the overarching marine ecosystem in a country in Central Africa
which is unprecedented for Africa, so incredible hope for a place that has been generally under
prioritized.
And now we get to Claudio Campagna and some of the work on the Southern Elephant Seal
and the Patagonia Sea.
I think a story youíll hear from Claudio today in understanding these animals and the
understanding of what can be done to restore oceans.
Not only in the US but around the world is really impressive and needs to be replicated
in nearly every country.
And so I will leave it to him to tell that story of success and continued possibility
for expansion of caring for and protecting our oceans that is unprecedented.
>>Claudio Campagna: Well, that image actually was helping me because this is being stretched
like that so the animal was looking a little bit larger.
Yet, Elephant Seals are 5 meters long and that was a particularly big one, so it was
helping me but in the right direction.
Iím going to talk about one place in the ocean, the Southwest Atlantic of the way we
call it, Patagonian Sea.
You have to imagine an area the size of the Mediterranean Sea, more or less, 1.5 million,
2 million square kilometers.
Most of these waters, the ones Iím specializing in, are part of the economic exclusive zone
of Argentina.
However, these waters were very well known in the 19th century because Darwin spent most
of the Voyage of the Beagle in that area; a couple of years at least.
But today the Argentines, not necessarily understand it.
Argentina is not a country that understands ocean, oceans as much as it understands tango
and beef consumption.
[laughter] Thatís not a minor issue for someone that wants to do ocean conservation that requires
people to understand what the ocean means and to put value into that.
This is more or less the way the world sees the ocean.
We just see the surface of the ocean.
We donít have a very good understanding of what the ocean means.
And we see the ocean very close to the coast.
We understand the ocean up to here, basically.
And then we donít understand much more.
This is a kind of, I wonder, but this is a kind of idea that I would suggest most people
have about the ocean.
Itís like a little bit of a combination of reality and mythology.
Itís a surrealist perspective of the ocean.
And there are good reasons.
If you look at some of the ocean creatures, they're very, very appropriate to create,
to promote our imagination about creatures that do not exist.
Have a look at this Southern Right Whale or at least South American sea lion.
These dolphins, mermaids, people were thinking about these animals like that, or monsters,
it was not inappropriate, they were having that understanding.
Just imagine ten thousand years ago, somebody walking around the coast of Peninsula Valdez
in Argentina seeing these kinds of scenarios.
People were having that perspective about the ocean.
The perspective that combines little bit of imagination with a little bit of reality.
Then the scientists came and we changed that perspective.
But we start to see the ocean in a very cold way; satellite pictures of productivity; of
ocean temperature.
We were capable of understanding where most ocean production was taking place.
But we started to lose sight of that mythology, of that particular attachment that came from
the heart that caused fear but also caused inspiration.
I think that the Conservation is trying to bring together both worlds.
And this is what we have been trying to do in Argentina.
My work there is on Elephant Seals, I work on these big creatures.
What I do, what I started to do was to observe the social behavior of these animals.
You have a Northern Elephant Seal very close by.
I strongly suggest you have a look at that.
What we were doing most of the time is we were sitting there on the beach watching the
behavior of these animals on the coast.
But then in the mid 1980s, the technology was available to us, to understand what these
animals were doing when they were going to the ocean, at sea.
Let me spend a second just to, okay, what they were doing at sea.
One thing that we did immediately is to put some recorders that were telling us about
the diving behavior of Elephant Seals.
And the people that were doing that work discovered that Elephant Seals can dive up to a mile
under water.
And they can spend up to two hours without coming back to the surface.
They are mammals; they have to come back to the surface to get air.
And this was being discovered in the mid 1980s, really.
With the Northern Elephant seal, he is very close by research by AÒo Nuevo doing, working
on AÒo Nuevo from UC Santa Cruz.
At the time that was being done, technology also allowed us to put instruments on Elephant
Seals that told us where the animals were located in the ocean.
Iím talking the early 1990s.
And we discovered these animals were not find food very close, like 5 kilometers, 10 kilometers,
100 kilometers, but very far away; 1,000 miles, 2,000 miles off the coast.
So all the sudden, we were facing a completely new challenge.
For us protection, at the time, meant to do something when the animals were on the coast,
to create protected areas to protect their reproductive sites.
But Elephant Seals were spending 80 percent of their time in the far away ocean, in the
open ocean, in the deep ocean, in the international waters, places that were not protected at
all.
We scientists, devoted to conservation, do worry about these things.
Cause we donít see the ocean like most people do when they just approach the coast for a
vacation and they get all the beauty, we are sensitive to that.
But, unfortunately, you have a special perspective that looks at the ocean with the problems
that the ocean has.
So when Iím in Patagonia and I see a Magellanic Penguin, of course I see the beauty of a Magellanic
Penguin, but I have seen also many, many oil Magellanic Penguins so I want to do something.
When Iím working on Elephant Seals, of course I love the social behavior they have when
they fight, they get very excited about that, but then I see all the animals that are being
entangled because they get all these garbage in the ocean, for some reason, they just swim
in and there are nets around their necks.
So, as conservationists, we have to face a reality that many people donít want.
Is this what, I think thereís an expression in English, this is a gloom and doom kind
of situation.
People say, ìOkay, we want to avoid that.
We want to avoid bad news.î Unfortunately, we conservationists have to deal with that
because we want to solve those problems.
When we were learning what Elephant Seals were doing in the ocean we conservationists
want to protect the areas where they are.
That means to protect the ocean.
Imagine that the coast of a national park on land is already a very difficult concept.
If you want to create a national park in the ocean, how do you start?
Particularly considering that most people donít even understand the ocean beyond the
knee.
So we need to establish, itís a communication problem, we need to establish that cause of
in the international community, in my case, in the Argentine, and Southern Cone community.
And this is what we have been doing in the last ten years and I will be telling you a
now, a little bit of a story about what the achievements were.
First we started out, as I was telling you, on coastal issues.
And we created a lot of coastal protected areas.
A few years ago, the first coastal national park was created in Argentina.
That was an achievement and that was a result of long term research being done along the
entire coast of Argentina on many species.
Of publishing papers, publishing reports, giving talks, talking to the Government, all
of that together resulted in the first coastal national park of Argentina.
And thatís something to celebrate.
Another thing that happened very recently is the creation of whatís called the Interjurisdictional
Park.
That is a park that belongs partially to the province, the province of Chubut and partially
to the federal government, the national parks.
They got together, they speak to each other and they decided to create a protected area
along the coast of Patagonia.
Thatís a very positive result, a very, very encouraging result.
And protected areas like those, there are many.
There are about 40 along the coast of Patagonia.
Some of them have been created in the 1980s with the work of the pioneer people that went
there to explore.
Now weíre implementing more than exploring.
And itís happening, itís taking place, itís taking momentum.
Itís a great time of history for that area of the world, now, because many of the people
that weíre trying to study these animals; Iíll go back to that.
Many people who are trying to study these animals now have some power.
Let me illustrate very quickly what I have said because perhaps you will get some better
idea, itís better to take home messages if I go very, very quickly.
Yeah.
So I was here and I was saying, imagine youíre walking here along the coast
>>Claudio Campagna: And all of a sudden you see a killer whale stranded trying to get
sea lions.
Well, the other beauty is not just about individuals, itís about colonies.
This is what you have in a temperate system, lots of animals gathering together, very important
because they are very vulnerable, very beautiful.
Look at these black browed albatrosses.
They are reproducing in an island.
I mean, I just have so many things to say.
This is a colony of Elephant Seals, where I work, that well, this is the way that scientists
are looking at these animals and these are another way.
I wanna show you this, this is the distribution of biodiversity, donít pay too much attention
to it, but whatís telling you is that you donít find animals equally distributed in
the ocean.
There are some places that are really much worse in terms of protection that require
much more work because, either there are many more species or some species are so unique
that if you donít protect them they are not being protected.
But this is the idea that I was telling you that when how I feel when I do conservation
work.
I feel that there is some threat all the time.
When I see these animals, I think about that.
Itís not occurring at this place, itís not taking place but it did occur in the past.
When I see these animals, I also see this.
This is still occurring today.
Okay, thatís the image of a conservationist.
We feel the weight of trying to support wildlife and actually we are quite happy to do that.
One of the issues that we conservationists in the ocean have to deal with is fisheries.
Look at this boat, this boat uses all that light to fish squid.
Look at this image.
This is a photograph from a satellite.
Thereís more light there than in the city Buenos Aires, almost.
And this is about a thousand miles long.
We're worried about these kind of issues; entanglement, by catch, garbage in the ocean,
but we are many, trying to solve those problems.
And we are there in the field every day.
One thing that we do is science, satellite tracking animals.
This is one thing that I satellite track, look at that.
Left Peninsula Valdes went to the Malvinas-Falkland Islands, round the Cape, into the South Pacific
open oceans to the Fjords of Chile and through the Magellan Channel back to Peninsula Valdes.
This was a juvenile, those are the kinds of challenges that we face if we want to protect
the ocean.
We have to come up with solutions to animals that use the oceans like that.
And there are many.
There is not just the Elephant Seals, thereís several species of penguins, turtles, etcetera.
Look at what the dimensions there are using in the ocean.
There are over a million of square kilometers thatís why we have to think like that.
Patagoniaís not just important because of the resident species.
This is an albatross that is reproducing in New Zealand.
After reproduction it crosses the Pacific, spends some time along the coast of Chile
and then goes round to the Patagonian Sea and spends the winter there and after that
goes round the world and back to the reproductive area.
We put together, integrated all this information into an atlas that is accessible in the internet.
Please have a look at this.
Itís www dot atlas dash marpatagonico dot org.
Youíll see the distribution of 16 different species.
And youíll find out how they compare to each other and you can put maps there of productivity
to understand why theyíre distributed like that.
I was telling you we have created protective areas.
Let me give you an example.
The examples I was telling you, they are coastal protected areas, but we are promoting open
ocean protected areas, this is the new concept.
Some of these open ocean protected areas do not need to be protected all year around.
They could be temporarily protected when they are very productive.
Others have to be protected in a way that move around, are not stable, itís not like
the land.
In the ocean, things move so today youíre protecting this but this is moving with the
current.
So in three months, youíre protecting this area.
Those are the kinds of concepts that we are trying to establish in the scientific community
but also among the stake holders that are using those resources.
One of the very much open oceans, completely open ocean protected area that was very recently
created is in this particular area called the Burdwood Bank.
This is like an island under water and the bottom of this bank is unique.
There are a lot of, what we call, endemic species, species that you just find there.
And we protected a small portion of this, but itís a beginning and itís very positive
one.
Iím not going to expect that you understand this slide, of course, and itís not going
to look great in YouTube but there is one issue that I think you will understand.
These are a group of fisheries called co-management fisheries.
Thereís a paper published in Science or Nature recently, itís Nature, they did an evaluation,
social scientists did, an evaluation about what was important for these fisheries.
Why these fisheries were being successful.
What made them sustainable?
First variable that explained that is leadership.
The leaders of those communities were capable of negotiating procedures, methodologies,
approaches that made those fisheries sustainable.
Very close to that is protected areas, protected areas do work.
Of course, you need will in the community and this is what thatís telling you.
So, in conservation like in your field.
leaders are critical.
Individuals make the difference.
And this is our leaders in the field in WCS, particularly in Patagonia.
There are several and we have been working there for almost half a century, 48 years,
since WCS started to have a project in Patagonia.
I think that I want to leave you with that idea.
There is hope, we are achieving results, we are facing huge problems but we feel that
communicating that will, we are going to convince people that there is another way of looking
at the ocean that has not been the old one with all the myths and itís not only the
ones that scientists use.
There is one that people want, that combines knowledge with the heart, and this is what
we are trying to transmit.
Thank you very much and this is the webpage I was telling you, please search it.
[Applause]
>> Caleb McClennon: So probably a number of questions for Claudio that we asked to combine
it all then weíll have question, answers about 5 minutes between the two of us.
So, obviously the creation, as you saw, there are almost 50 reserves along the coast of
Argentina over those years is unprecedented in the world and really congratulatory to
Claudio and his team.
Iím gonna speak briefly about this opportunity that weíve put together and Winnie has really
been working with us to identify a way how WCS, that works in 60 countries around the
world with thousands of staff in all these different places could work with Google and
one idea that came up was we have a few permanent research stations.
Research is really one component of conservation, itís certainly not the entirety, but there
are some research stations that we have and some of them are ongoing research projects
in places that weíve worked at 20 years or so can use some assistance in terms of monitoring
because it takes a lot of people power as well as thinking to monitor the state of the
ecosystem.
So this is an island in Belize which WCS has owned for about 20 years.
We donít do a lot of land purchases in our organization but this is on Glover's Reef
Atoll which is one of the only Atolls in the Atlantic Ocean.
So a Coral Atoll is a ring island with no center, the center has subsided away so itís
only coral growth keeping it above the sea.
In order to protect this place; which is one of the most important places in the Caribbean;
which if you remember the beginning itís one of the most important places in the entirety
of the Atlantic Ocean.
There needed to be a fisheries base there for patrols.
And the fisheries department has to be actively out there and regulating the fisheries.
As a result almost a third of the atoll is fully protected and the rest is extremely
well managed fishery, uncommon for the rest of the Mesoamerican Barrier Reef.
So the fishery department has a small base here that they use, that they use for free
with us, and then we have our research station where we have about twenty bunks.
And I guess part of this is to be very clear what type of accommodations we have there,
basically twenty field bunks for staff, Iím sorry for visiting scientists, student groups
and people that come through and assist us with our research work.
So this is just a photo of the island and, of course, we do a lot of work on all the
different aspects of the, a place we monitor coral reef annually, spiny lobsters which
is the critical commercial fishery interest, conch, different, several species of grouper,
we have a long term shark monitoring program, interestingly the shark at Glover's Reef is
one of the only populations in the whole Mesoamerican Barrier Reef that has been stable over the
last 20 years, whereas the rest of the areas has started to go down.
So itís, with all this monitoring has shown and been able to inform the success of our
work but also help us adaptively manage as time goes on.
So in thinking through with Winnie as a way we might be able to work together, we have
a sea turtle monitoring project that happens annually, itís coordinated with the fisheries
department, all of work in Belize and in all the countries where we work is done in coordination
with the management authority.
And so the end of April we will be going out and require and need people to help us run
some transects and help monitor the entirety of the atoll for its resident sea turtle population.
So it turns out that we came to Glovers Reef for its robust biodiversity in terms of coral
reef and the fish populations were very healthy.
Some of our sea turtle researchers, similar folks to Claudio, leaders in their field,
came in and did some work and identified that this is a critical habitat for a lot of juvenile
turtles.
So for the last four years weíve been running transects on an annual basis to identify and
start monitoring that population.
Certainly not for 25 years, the way Claudio has with Elephant Seals in Argentina, but
weíre just starting to determine the relative importance of the place.
So itís a great opportunity to participate itís certainly not a vacation in that we
need the help and weíre not an ecotourism outfit, weíre a research and conservation
organization.
So itís for anyone that is interested in signing up or learning more about it, it is
absolutely going to be some work that youíll be doing.
And we need to be clear about that otherwise expectations will be very, very far.
What weíll be structuring the day like for folks is half the day, we only have 8 slots,
so we only have the ability, though the station can take more people, we can only actively
employ 8 people to be working on this and we donít want to have a lot of people sitting
around.
So one half of the day will be participating in the transect, the line monitoring for sea
turtles, the other half of the day will be to recover or recoup, actually maybe enjoy
a little bit of the island.
And this is one island on the large atolls so there is several actual tourism outfits
on the other parts of the island that we will be able to find ways for people to have some
time off.
It will be 6 days that youíll be out here on the island, then if you do decide to sign
up and have some interest in this and decide you want to see more of the country of Belize,
cause thereís fantastic rain forest, jaguar reserves, that would be on your own to stay
longer and arrange as well.
Our team, we have a boat, weíll take you out to the atoll, so about 40 miles off the
coast of Belize and then weíll take you back at the end as well.
So itís a really, we donít have a lot
>>Caleb McClennon: of opportunities like this, weíre not an organization that is, this is
not part of our model of conservation, itís just this happened, Winnie was great.
We threw around probably twenty different ways we might be able to work together, this
talk today was one of them, and another was this trip which Winnie has been fantastic
about trying to find a way for us to work together.
So, happy to answer questions about that, questions about what you might see in Belize
and then Claudio is here all the way from Argentina as well, so I hope there might be
a few questions about the fantastic work that theyíve been doing there.
Thank you very much for your time, itís been really great to have this opportunity, we
really appreciate it.
[Applause]
>>Caleb McClennon: So if you have questions if you donít mind using the microphone so
people could hear you or you could, I guess, decide you donít want to be on the microphone.
[Laughs] >>Caleb McClennon: Yes.
>>Female #1: I just want to, yeah so you guys can hear me, exactly what kind of work [inaudible]
>>Caleb McClennon: So the timing youíll be spending, because youíll be split into groups
of four, so the time youíll be spending on [inaudible], youíll be out on a boat and
swimming, so snorkeling, not scuba diving, that would bring in a whole other set of complications,
snorkeling and we do linear transects swimming for identifying any of the sea turtle groups,
uh, species that are there.
So we have greens and hawksbill and sometimes several other species that come through.
But greens and hawksbill are the primary.
Um, so itíd be about, uh, from when you leave the dock, our pier here, thereíd be about
4 hours out to the survey site that we choose for that day, cause itís a random selection
of sites throughout the Atoll; thereís some statistical, no thereís very much statistical
significance because itís been designed by our ecologists.
Then youíll be swimming transects for several hours, moving around a few times, we do catch
the turtles.
Youíre not required, because it is a physically difficult thing to catch the turtles, but
we do catch them and if you do we will tag them and we will have several, one if not
two, satellite tags that weíre hoping to put on if we get the appropriately aged turtle,
so afterwards you build a follow.
Thereís a website called seaturtle dot org which freely allows you to monitor turtles.
So hopefully if things all go well and weíll have one we can tag with a satellite receiver
and be able to track after the trip.
Then youíll come home.
So youíll just have had breakfast, be out for up to 4 hours, come home for lunch and
then the afternoon would be yours.
There is, not extremely high speed Wi-Fi, but there is some Wi-Fi.
I wouldnít expect anyone that does a lot of modeling or anything like that would be
able to do that through the internet, but you would have some communication.
And that part of the day would be a bit of a break.
Weíve got a great Belizean, our whole team that youíre gonna be working with is a Belizean
team.
Our team leader, Robin Coleman is a PhD ecologist from Belize and a champion for conservation
there.
And a whole set of the Belizean fishery staff will be with you and we have about five permanent
staff at this station who will be serving you food, maybe as good as we ate today at
Google, I donít know, those of you that go can tell us, but great solid Belizean food
to make sure that you donít waste away when youíre out there.
Does that help?
>>Female #1: Yes.
>> Caleb McClennon: Okay.
Yeah?
>>Male #1: So you mentioned that Argentina is more about salsa and beef than oceans.
[Laughter]
>>Claudio Campagna: Tango.
Tango.
>>Male #1: Oh right
>>Claudio Campagna: Yeah.
>>Male #1: Um but that this new reserve had been created, in the Southern part of the
ocean, does that, do you perceive that thereís a sea change going on that the people, the
leadership are bringing more there and accelerating?
>>Claudio Campagna: Yes.
Very much, the head of the National Parks of Argentina today, Patricia Gandini is a
person that understands the ocean.
She has been working with WCS for a long time, she has a PhD, do work on penguins and she
has been facilitating the process of creating, not just national parks, but many interjurisdictional
areas and I think that makes a difference.
Leadership, again, she understands that.
Patriciaís boss, actually, is a minister of the tourism in Argentina and he understands
protected areas, very, very much.
And I think that we have some political will there that is aligned and is very important.
Peninsula Valdes, which is one of the most beautiful places on the coast of Patagonia,
the person in charge of Peninsula Valdes, [unclear] who is a secretary of tourism, is
a conservationist and is part of an NGO that I help create with her and other WCS people.
So things are happening because the Indonesians, now, are in the right positions to make things
happen and the Argentines are very sensitive.
If, the sooner they are being informed about an issue they respond.
They donít want the penguins to be killed; they donít want the penguins to be oil they
worry.
So I think itís a community that historically has not been very much trained to watch the
ocean but is very easily trained.
>>Male #1: One more question.
This is kind of a softball but what, beyond coming and counting turtles, what can we as
people who care about the ocean, do to affect change around the world and save the biodiversity
of the oceans.
>>Claudio Campagna: You can help the NGOs that are doing ocean conservation, no, this
is more than that, itís much more.
There are many, many things that you can do.
First, youíre a consumer of ocean products, even if you donít want; you are, in some
ways or another.
Be a responsible consumer.
Be aware that many fisheries are not sustainable and that many species should not be consumed.
Itís very easy to find Chilean sea bass here and you have to be aware of that.
Itís very easy to find shrimp in any cocktail, you should be careful about that because shrimp
causes a very high bycatch.
In some places of the world, one pound of shrimp, one kilo of shrimp results in ten
kilo of diversity that is being thrown away because it has no commercial value.
So as a consumer you could really, really do a lot.
You can also spread the word.
You have seen the finning problem, shark problem.
The world does not necessarily know much about that.
Youíre educated people, you know that, but many people donít.
Be sure that you talk you integrate conservation in your everyday discourse.
Youíre, you know, as Caleb was saying today [inaudible], itís a castle of; itís an intellectual
paradise that would, that is a communication paradise.
Make sure that the world knows that there is an ocean there and that the ocean requires
our support.
Many people of the world believe that the ocean is an exhaustible, I mean, cannot be
used up, thatís a wrong perception, we need to change that.
You could help develop technological tools.
For example, to map areas or to create, to analyze, to do spatial analysis, zoning, so
you can contribute with the technical aspects of it.
You can educate your children, your friends; thatís extremely important.
You could be part of some of our expeditions and some of our work.
Get involved in really obtaining the information.
>>Caleb McClennon: I should add that on Google ocean layers, that Google has supported, Claudioís
site is one of the first participants in providing
>>Claudio Campagna: Yeah.
>> Caleb McClennon: So there has been ways that weíve worked together as well.
>>Claudio Campagna: So and today I was just coming and all of a sudden we say [inaudible].
So the community of Google is sensitive to the ocean.
I was very gladly surprised.
And of course Google brain could change the world in the way we see the ocean.
>>Caleb McClennon: Any other questions?
Yeah?
Stay here.
>>Claudio Campagna: Oh.
>>Male #2: I was wondering how you decided when, how much of your effort to put on protecting
the deep sea versus the coastline?
>>Claudio Campagna: Most of my life I dedicated to doing work that was helpful for coastal
protection, thatís what I did.
And today the WCS in Argentina is still doing that and in the Southern Cone because we also
work in Chile very much.
You know, there are some areas of Chile that are extraordinary as coastal areas.
The Fjords of Chile are unique.
You donít find those places in any other place in the world.
So many, many people, most people, most of the effort that we put there is about coastal
conservation still today.
It is required.
A proportion of us have the courage to move away from that specific need into another
perspective for which we did not have a big market.
People were understanding that the coasts had to be protected because you see the coast.
You donít see the ocean and you donít see the depth, the deep ocean.
I have been leading what is called a Sea and Sky Project, the name is suggesting that the
way I think about the ocean and the sky, I do think about the coast, of course, but Iím
trying to promote these ideas of the deep ocean protection, around the ocean protection.
For me itís most of the work that I do.
For the organization, itís a proportion of that work that we what we do.
The open ocean has many problems as you might know, one is jurisdictional.
Countries have a decision on the first two hundred miles and there they could determine
whoís coming whoís leaving what is being done.
Beyond the two hundred miles itís the commons, itís everybody owns it.
There are some laws but it is very difficult to enforce whatís going on.
And fisheries today are moving into that realm.
Theyíre moving into international waters.
There are a group of people, and we are part of that, alliances of organization that are
trying, organizations, that are trying to understand what can be done to protect the
international waters.
And a few things are being done and a few places must be protected.
For example, sea mounds.
The sea mounds are very, are places deep in the ocean that are unique because you have
a flat ocean and all of a sudden you have something like that.
And that creates particular very sensitive places where you have a biodiversity that
is only there.
Those sea mounds are being fished.
So we need to protect them and there is a strong effort into trying to do that because
we donít even know the species that are there.
So, as an answer is, most of the work still requires to be done on the coast.
Thatís a must, but a few of us itís sustainable if a portion of us will move into the more
challenging, more experimental phases.
But those experimental phases have to be turned into, not that experimental, but into something
more tangible very soon otherwise itís very easy to destroy this small environment like
a sea mound.
>>Claudio Campagna: Did that, does it answer?
>>Male #2: Yes.
>>Caleb McClennon: Okay, any other questions?
Yeah, go ahead.
>>Male #3: Uh, Claudio a question.
>>Claudio Campagna: Yeah.
>>Male #3: Is the trip restricted to Google employees or what about qualified friends?
>>Caleb McClennon: For the moment, uh, if you sign up itís restricted to Google employees
just cause currently, from what Iím understanding of demand, we have more than 8 from Google
so we like to keep it that way.
But if you are signing up and would like to make a note that if it doesnít fill up weíd
like to bring someone as well we can open up that question if itís possible.
>> Female: [Inaudible]
>>Caleb McClennon: Sheís the boss so yes, there you go.
[Laughs]
>>Caleb McClennon: I should say, cause I notice a couple people are leaving, we had you stay
til the end of the hour for questions but if itís not apparent, I think it will be
apparent that if youíd like to sign up please go to that address and I think on this email
for the work, for the talk today , you saw thereís an address to sign up and weíre
taking applications or your expressions of interest until Monday and then weíre gonna
make decisions cause I know people will need to plan their personal lives cause itís the
last week in April.
So if youíre interested, please before, on the Glover's Reef trip, please sign up and
put all of your information in to that address by Monday.
We have a couple more minutes for, uh, if thereís anything Iím missing just from folks?
Okay.
We have two more minutes for people and then weíll take casual questions after.
>>Claudio Campagna: Let me just say one thing more about your question about what you can
do.
Letís be in touch, letís talk because thereís some things that people have to understand
about what they want to do.
>>Caleb McClennon: Yeah.
>>Claudio Campagna: And we can help guide that.
So I just gave you a general understanding but, you know, if you want to talk about that
Iím very open to discuss it with you and everybody.
>>Male #4: Is the political tension between the Argentina and the Falkland Islands proving
to be challenging or do people find ways to work around.
>>Claudio Campagna: Yes.
It is.
The war between the UK and Argentina in 1982 was unfortunate.
It is a problem that you can analyze from many different perspectives.
Certainly the political perspective is not my place to analyze that problem.
I could speak as an individual but from a conservation perspective it is a pity that
that happened cause now all of a sudden one ocean is being seen from many different perspectives
and that does not help.
Cause the ocean does not work like that.
So countries have to make decisions on a regional level and a very large level.
That problem is creating some issues some dialogue has been interrupted.
And now there are some developments that are taking place in the Islands that Argentines
donít decide about and thatís causing clearly tension.
I had the hope, I mean I have it, that perhaps the conservation perspective has an umbrella
that embraces that problem and puts that into perspective.
But it has to, we need time.
And yes, it has been a problem.
And for us has been a challenge to think in the open ocean considering that situation,
that jurisdictional issue.
>>Caleb McClennon: Alright.
Well, thank you so much everyone.
Thanks to Winnie for being our host, we really appreciate and look forward to talking to
you each individually or afterwards.
And thank you from WCS to Google and look forward to working together.
[Applause]