How To Protect The Ocean
SUFB 070: Ocean Talk Friday
Nathan and I talk about some more popular news this week. The topics discussed on this episode: Oceans Parks catching up to National Parks; Reduce meat consumption to reduce climate change impacts; Japan joins security council and other countries are angry because of their whaling activity; and, Great Whites might be changing where they like to eat, sleep, and other stuff.
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10 Ocean Tips to Conserve the Ocean:
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Show Notes:
http://www.speakupforblue.com/session70
Welcome to the speaker for blue podcast session number 70 today is my favorite day of the week it's friday not only because the weekend's coming up but it's ocean talk friday today we're going to talk about national parks compared to ocean parks we're going to talk about why you shouldn't eat meat even though i'm not sure i agree with that we're also going to talk about japan trying to get out of you and security council even though it's not listening to the international community with this whole whale hunt and lastly we're gonna wonder we're gonna try and figure out what these great white sharks are doing on the west coast where why are they not showing up where they normally should all this today on ocean talk friday we got lost to do but here is your next speaker for blue podcast welcome to the speaker for blue podcast helping you get involved in ocean conservation and now here's your host he still puts his hands in the air because he doesn't care andrew lewin hey everybody welcome back to another exciting episode of the speaker for blue podcast your voice for the ocean i am your host andrew lewin founder speak up for blue dot com marine ecologist and self-proclaimed oceanpreneur and today is ocean friday so you know what that means i am joined by my co-host and guest and blogger and just all around great guy nathan johnson nathan how you doing buddy i'm doing well after that great introduction thank you no bra i'm going to try and make it different every time and just embarrass you more and more every time no but nathan's been really contributing if you haven't looked at the at the websites uh i've been talking a lot on the on the podcast obviously what you've been listening to and nathan's been really helping me uh write the blog post and really expand on what i'm trying to say if i don't say it clear enough he really goes into into depth with it and he's been doing a great job so if you ever see his name on the podcast he's writing all the information on the podcast whoever his name is coming up but uh he's been doing a fantastic job and we've got him i've had him agree to write some other articles on top of that so he he does this all volunteer so this is fantastic so i really appreciate your help nathan and the speaker for blue community does too oh no problem i love doing it yeah this is and this is of course our favorite time of the week right we talk about ocean articles we're gonna get right into it because this is what we do and we've got a lot of stuff to cover uh why don't you talk about our first article new the first one is out of the atlantic um it's it's in honor of sort of the centennial for the us national park service so that was set up in in 1906 um and over the last 100 years is protected uh it's inspired the protection of 14 percent of earth's land so all across different countries different continents we've protected about 14 percent of it um it's been a great way to convey conservation issues and the importance of these natural habitats to the general public it's you know it wasn't really thought of as being a great program at first it took some convincing um but it's really turned out to be a great federal program at least here in the states so um the uh the tone of this article though is it's it's focused more on why we're not doing the same for our oceans so it's discussing a panel uh that had silvia earl and jane lupchenko in it um and they're they're advocating for similar treatment of our ocean ecosystems and they provide some interesting stats so 14 percent of our land is protected uh but only 3.4 percent of our oceans are protected and even less of that 3.4 percent are areas that have complete protection so no fishing whatsoever no extraction of any of any sort of marine resources right um so they they make a they raise a good question as to you know why are we not doing the same for our oceans we we need to protect our oceans for a variety of issues that we've already talked about um but it's it's becoming really clear with climate change and with an expanding population that if we don't do this now there may not be many areas to protect in the future and so um they compare uh or there they bring up the example of Chesapeake Bay oyster reefs so these oysters have been dropped down to about 1 percent of their historic population um which you know i'm not sure the exact number but that's probably over the last couple hundred years or 150 years or so um and and there so there there is some good news uh over last year there was only 2 percent of our oceans protected in the last year we've protected another 1.4 which is great uh but still we're really lagging behind us when you compare it to the national park service and uh their their question has been basically why are we not doing more yeah it's it's true and and uh i think i have i i mean i think i have the answer uh you know you mentioned earlier when the national park service first started to come in to play people were against it probably because it was a restrictive thing and people weren't used to it they were used to using resources at will wherever they can find it uh especially in 1906 right there there everything was a little bit more you know quote-unquote wild wild west where you can go into an area develop it and then do whatever you want with it there wasn't a lot of regulations nowadays there's a lot more there are a lot more regulations but i think also i mean really people if you think about national park service when you go to a national park whatever country you're in you take pride in that park especially the u.s in Canada people camp out there they're very respectful when they go there what most people are they're very respectful there are rangers to patrol all the time and it's just it's considered sort of like a national monument where it's it's very important and you treat it with respect with and it's also because you get to be fully enthralled in it you know when you're in a when you're in a park you're in a forest you're just like this i'm in a forest i'm camping i'm seeing nature i'm seeing maybe you see a bear far off or you see some elk or you see some moose or uh some wolves far off i keep saying far off because you don't want to be close but you know like all this this beautiful nature and you don't see that in the ocean all the time because you're at the surface and you're on a ship and you may be there i mean unless it's a cruise you might be there for maybe you know a day at you know tops or even a couple of hours just kind of floating around and whatever you get to see you get to see like in some parks you know they'll have um like some ocean parks they'll have like whale watching and you can go in and do whale watching but you may or may not see you whale you know i mean so you're not guaranteed to see what you want to see and i think that makes that that that makes a big thing where people just don't understand what there is needed to protect i mean i know there's there's a cartoon that i found a long time ago where you have there's a guy on a beach and he's staring out into the ocean and he's like i don't get it everybody talks about we need to protect things but there's nothing to protect because he's staring at the top and underneath the surface where all these other animals that are just you know swimming around there was whales jellyfish deep sea squid right at the bottom and it was just you know it was a cartoon so it kind of made it an extreme version but it's true when you when people look at the ocean they don't see what you and i know what's under there right because we've been taught we've seen videos and we see things so i think up till now there's been a little bit that's why we have that lag it's harder to regulate there's is that resistance from industry because it's a wild wild west kind of scenario you can use anything you want i mean now in certain areas i know in canada oil and gas uh industries have have leased out most of the bottom of the ocean on the east coast so even if the government wanted to they'd have to buy the lease back and try and try and conserve right so it doesn't make sense so it's kind of like sometimes you're working from a hole and this and that but i think now people are realizing there's more focus on notions there's there's more information being disseminated from people like yourself and i deep sea news southern fried science just all the the journal articles and all like scientific american everything like that national geographic people are seeing what's undersea all the time like if you look at the speaker for blue facebook feed it's just crazy like all all it is i'm sharing video of underwater footage of this is beautiful things and it gets people excited and you're like oh okay yeah that's under the ocean like today i you know i i share like baby octopus you know and they're they're hatching and you're like when you're gonna see that you're not gonna see that anywhere and so it's just kind of fun like it kind of ignites that thing it's like oh there is stuff to protect and we need to protect it so long when an answer i just think that now more people are getting into it and we realize how important it is to protect a lot of this environment because everything is changing and we know the effect that we have compared to like 1906 where it was maybe even harder for industry to really put their footprint down to get into the national parks right to like i gotta understand like maybe cutting for us but they were never that as efficient as they were that as they are now to really clear cut you know what i mean it was more sustainable anyway because they didn't have the machines and the technology as they do now so that could be also a reason where you know we didn't have the same kind of trawling as we do now where we can take out an entire bottom of of an ocean right or like over of a space ocean so you know i think there's a lot of different right now so anyway what are your thoughts on yeah i think you touched on most of of the major points it's it's getting to be more popular of a stance to protect the oceans but then when you get into logistically how you do that it's still kind of an unpopular option you know like if the alternative is the government buying up leases from private industry that's not a popular option no it's difficult to enforce marine protected areas for a number of reasons um it's you have a different uh experience as a consumer if if you want to use that word as as a participant in a protected area then you would in a national park like you said because you can't really camp out um you know if you can if you go diving or yes you know sometimes fishing or or something like that or whale watching you might have a great experience but that also removes a lot of the population who may not partake in those activities so um it's harder to get public support for something that not a lot of people can interact with um i i guess one thing that i would really stress is if you ever had the opportunity to go snorkeling or scuba diving anywhere even if it's not unlike a beautiful reef just go go do it it's it's amazing it'll change the way you think of these things maybe you might start hearing some of our conversations think we're a little less crazy um i don't know about that yeah so you know i if you take away one thing from this pay for snorkeling scuba diving class go go on a trip somewhere and and just do it it's really cool um you'll see a lot of amazing stuff and and you might learn a lot more about what's out there and um hopefully we'll get more support for these types of things going forward yeah i i completely agree i mean get out there and and get it get immersed in in this kind of stuff even if it's on a beach or a coast um if you know if you're not a huge fan of the water get on the water go whale watching i mean those things are amazing things to watch uh go scuba diving snorkeling all that kind of stuff um you know one thing that was interesting too though is uh in this article they mentioned the parks that are around now are more are parks that were chosen more of convenience right and one example that they mentioned was and we've mentioned this before was the northern hawaiian island uh protected area that i think it's a marine sanctuary that george w bush put in place right before he left office he chose that and it's a it's a huge park but it's also very remote and so there isn't a pressure for drilling there aren't pressures for fishing so protecting that area was one it was important for diversity and it was a good proactive move just in case anything else moves in there in the future but it wasn't really one where it would do uh like a huge change but more of just protect what's already there you know just to make sure that nothing nothing bad happens when we're getting into more of like what i think is maybe more significant was the stuff uh of the um uh what they it's the southern mpa network of mpa's southern california network of mpa's that they've just implemented i think it was three three years ago four years ago that was big because there were a lot of users that were involved in that a lot of stakeholders so you got fishermen you got first nation's groups uh you've got wind wind power solar power oil and gas mining although and then government and then you've got the non-profit organizations that are representing the environment you've got all those stakeholders involved it's a lot harder to get but the protection is there now and it's going to be it's a it's a much widely used uh much more widely used area and i think the protection there will do a lot more in the future than say somewhere out in the Hawaiian islands not to take away anything from you know protecting the Hawaiian islands it needs to be protected but it's not as significant in terms of you know the pressures that are involved in it and i think that makes a difference too is putting those protected areas in areas where there is a lot of pressure or there's a future where there's a lot of pressure i think it's harder and it takes longer but eventually it'll have a maximum benefit right so yeah no i yeah i i agree i mean there's certain areas where it's if in in my opinion if you can get a protected area anywhere go for it um and like you said some of them are just gonna not face the opposition that others will but at some point there aren't there are areas that will probably need to be addressed as you know these are high traffic areas but they're also really ecologically important um for for whatever reason and and you need to set up some sort of way to manage those effectively that's not just rampant consumption yeah no i agree and i just wanted to mention just before we move on to the next story uh the on the panel that was at this discussion for the national park service was uh you know there's Andy refkin who's part of the new york times he's a journalist who's been involved in a lot of this stuff but there's still dr silvia earl and dr jane lupchenko who are like i would say world leaders i i would consider them world leaders in ocean protection both of them were at one time uh the director of noah which is a huge feat um jane lupiken chunko was the one of this pre i don't know who the who the one is now but she was the previous director of noah and of course um silvia earl was the first woman to be a director of noah back and i believe it was the 70s maybe even the 60s um anyway both of them very prominent women scientists that um have a big voice and they were on the panel talking about this and they definitely know their stuff so i thought that was a great article you picked out here for uh for this so when you just to let the audience know when you see uh a process starting for a protected area for an ocean get involved you know either talk to an organization find out how you can get involved talk to a member of your government whether it be a probably federal or state or provincial uh and get involved and see how you can get more involved because it's uh moi importante as my bad spanish is because i don't know spanish uh anyway okay let's go on to the next story this next story is not really a story per se um however uh it has to do with something that just happened on the speaker for blue page uh i shared a story and i actually did a podcast on story at the beginning of the week where there were 300 seawales that were dead found dead in chili um 30 i think was 337 was the final number 32 skeletons and then the rest were fresh bodies obviously a huge tragedy especially in like the patagonia region which is very natural there weren't any markings on this on the whales and so forth and anyway if you want to get more information uh they basically they they almost concluded they haven't come out with the results yet but they almost concluded that the whales were either had a virus or went through some kind of red tide um area and and died through through toxicity i did the monday's podcast uh i believe it was speakerforblue.com/session66 would be that would be the podcast that you would you would refer to to get the story on that it was interesting because the comments i got from that i actually shared the original story from where i found it on yahoo originally and somebody i'm not gonna say the name of the person because she's a great person and she really comments quite a bit and i love to have that comment and she's great it just it was an issue that's come up and it wasn't her being malicious or anything like that it was just an interesting comment that she made um so the first comment she made was just you know she was just like oh my gosh like side of the times you know climate change is coming more red tides this and that we need to do more and i i respond i'm like yeah we definitely need to do more to make sure we reduce our input on the atmosphere and then she made the comment she's like yeah less meat for starters dot dot dot that's an easy step and easy was in capital letters i thought that was interesting because i'm a meat eater i i like meat i like the taste obviously i like the protein i get from it i'm big into health and i'm trying to get healthier so i'm eating a lot of protein so i ended up being a lot of chicken probably in a lot of less red meat and stuff but there's a lot there've been some articles floating around the internet and studies saying you know meat the production of meat in sort of developed countries is contributing quite a bit to climate change the methane gas i guess that's produced um is is contributing a lot to uh the co2 in the atmosphere so that's a big thing but anyway before i go on what do you what are your thoughts on this nathan like do you think i guess you know she's saying that eating meat is eating less meat is an easy decision is is it an easy decision i i think it's like anything i don't think you can say whether it's an easy decision or not i mean it depends on the person it depends on their habits and and what they're used to and um you know where they live it's not as easy to go meatless in texas as it would be in like vermont or uh seattle or places like that i'm assuming um so it's it my my personal stance on this is i don't think you can argue that if everyone ate less meat or no meat at all that there would be less carbon emissions related to the cattle and meat industry i think that's obvious i'm i'm not gonna argue that point with anyone but i think from a from a environmental point of view there are there are a lot of things you can get behind there's a lot of movements a lot of things you can do in your daily life to make your carbon footprint less and there's a lot a lot of things that are easier in in my mind or that would take less a less drastic shift in behavior than eating less meat wood for for what i'm assuming is the majority of people so obviously i'm biased i i eat meat pretty regularly throughout the week so you know i think i could definitely eat less meat yeah i think it's also just not a popular opinion to push that being the only solution to eat right no meat at all um so i i think if you and we talked about this before the show if you offer it as a potential list or a potential item on a list of 10 ways you can help i think that's great give people plenty of options i just don't think you should expect that to be the the one that people pick because it's it's an unpopular one it's you know people could debate whether it's even realistic to get rid of meat or to eat significantly less meat because it is a significant source of protein for a lot of different people so um it's it's a bold stance i think if if you're up for it go for it but i think you just got to offer it with other things that may be easier for other people to uh to take part in yeah and to be fair to the person who who who put this post up she did say less you know eat less red meat for starters right you know and she said that's an easy first step and and like now that i think about it i think like we said before in moderation if you decrease the amount of red meat that you eat and you know from a health standpoint it's actually not good to eat red meat five days a week seven days a week right they are i think the the maximum they should have been a staker no even though it would be great because it tastes good but you get sick of it and you get sick from it probably uh but you know i think twice a week once or twice a week is i think is i think is a moderate amount and i think it's i think that would do something if everybody did that that would make it better um obviously like you said it's it's it's you can't argue against the facts where the amount of pollution or the amount of methane that's generated from this process is really bad and and it it does contribute to climate change and i want you know i wonder also that the alternatives to that is to maybe more grass fed beef or more sort of a quote-unquote organically grown beef where it's not part of that big factory process where the you know that's how it's generated and i think a more and more people are finding those roots or those routes to actually go and find and and get that kind of meat instead of sort of the process meat that's around now right um i always worry about chemicals in meat so i tend now to find other sources you know like uh lentils and beans and and things like that but i still i need like my i eat more chicken than i do eat red meat or fish that i do eat red meat but even fish you got to be careful because of mercury you know um so i i even wonder if we're just doing it to ourselves we're putting ourselves down a path of more of a vegetarian vegan kind of diet where like everything's so full of toxic that you know you just you just kind of go down that route but i think it was an interesting comment i wanted to i wanted to just talk about it briefly on the show because i just love the fact that people are making these comments to make us think because it definitely made me think and i responded and i just said i think it's difficult to tell people eat less meat red meat or don't eat let don't eat red meat because that's going to help the environment especially when people are just new they're like well that's what i have to do no i'm not doing that because it's it's almost like it's like a culture you know especially when i don't know why i'm thinking this maybe it's a bit chauvinist but especially for like the guy's point of view is you eat meat you know you get together with some friends you have beer and you have a steak you know i mean with like a big potato on the side and that's what you do it's meat if you don't there's a certain stigma attached to it and and and i think that happens with a lot of people nowadays um where it's like oh let's let's just eat meat there are more people who are changing their ways but i still think that stigma is there and people still want to eat meat and they get protective of it you know what i mean and and i think it's interesting that way yeah and i think you brought up a good point that i want to clarify and that you there's a lot of good reasons to eat less red meat you know if if you're someone who eats a lot of it throughout the week so um you know i think it's really all how you phrase it you can i don't know how much success you'll have if you say the way to cut down on carbon on your carbon footprint is to eat less meat less red meat um i think that might alienate a lot of people but you can focus on the positives of doing that you know if if you balance it with a healthy diet it'll be healthy overall it'll it can cost less yeah um it can make the time i mean if if you say okay one night a week i'll have like a steak dinner or something if you normally have red meat twice or three times a week then it makes that night kind of more special you're looking forward to it more because it's a rarity so right you know it it's all how you phrase it i think that's a it's a good idea and i think if you phrase it properly and work it in with other potential options that say this is one way here are some other ways you know pick a couple like you said earlier um and you know which whichever one seems to be easiest for your lifestyle or it's something that you would be interested in pursuing because if if you force people to do things uh that they're not necessarily interested in then they're not going to have the chance to kind of keep that up long term right so if you say here are three or four options pick which one appeals to you the most they're more likely to work that into their daily routine yeah and even if you like you know if you give an option say like say two options off the bat is uh you know change your your light bulbs to led and eat less red meat people can say well i'm not going to do a full change of leds because leds are crazy expensive they last forever but they're crazy expensive so i can't afford to change all my light bulbs to led right off the bat but i'm going to start changing it so maybe as the light as a bulb goes out i put a new led in and the same thing with meat is i'll reduce it a little bit but doing both like in moderation and that slow change can really have an impact over on their overall footprint and then if more people do it then it's it's that community sort of thing where you you all reduce it and then it's in moderation just like maybe like when we used to and maybe there's a last process meet after that maybe the grass fed or grant you know ends up doing better because people start to move towards that slowly you know and it's just it's everybody's personal preference there's many ways to change and if you do a little bit of all of it then you know you're in good shape so anyway that's all we're going to speak there i just want to think i'm not going to mention the person Nathan i don't want to put her on the spot but it was a great comment and i'm glad we discussed it because i think i changed my position a little bit on it when i first read it i was a little defensive but i think she made a good point it was less red meat and not and i may have misinterpreted it as no red meat at all but i think it's a good point and i'm glad she put it up there so thank you very much for doing that let's move on to our next story as we move into this ocean talk friday i want you uh hit it off we're talking about whales and then sharks after this is gonna be awesome all right we're ending strong so this next story comes from is comes from the UN it's about a lot of protests that have happened since um japan was appointed uh or was elected as a non-permanent member of of the UN Security Council and this goes mostly hand-in-hand with the fact that japan has been under fire for their um essential disregard for the international whaling laws so um the the international whaling commission has multiple times stated that you know japan cannot be killing whales the way they are killing whales the amount that they're killing for the reasons that they're killing them and japan has said that they're doing it for research purposes uh but they do sell the meat and they argue that you know they're selling the meat because it's allowed since the whale is already dead for science that they can you know make make what they can off of the remainder of the whale and um there's a lot of controversy over that whether they should be doing that whether they should be doing that in the amount that they are um and and i want to preface this by saying i'm not an expert in international diplomacy or un regulations so i don't know a lot about how the inner workings of this process how the process works but um so japan was voted as a non-permanent member which means they have uh they don't have veto power for anything related to the UN Security Council it's a two-year term um as of now 33 countries have officially protested or expressed unhappiness with this election but the interesting thing that to me was there's there's 194 countries in the UN in this article it says 184 countries supported japan's bid um nine abstained so i imagine that nine kind of formally disapproved but it's a secret ballot so you don't know which countries voted in which favor but 33 countries have come out against it which means some of them who've come out against it actually voted for japan so i mean it it's one of those things where if you're if you're a conservationist or an environmentalist then you're going to oppose japan's actions regarding whaling and you don't think that a country that has this type of international activity in and disregard for um an iucn ruling should be elected as a head of an international body but then it it would be naive to think that economic uh or political or diplomatic issues didn't play a role in this as well i mean there's a lot of other reasons why countries may want japan um elected as a as a non-permanent member of the security council um so it's you know i i don't know if this is going to do anything about it this um secretary general's come out and said he can't do anything about it you know it wasn't his call to make yeah so um you know i think right now it is what it is and it's it's a little frustrating um from an environmentalist point of view but there's there's other things that play so it's um it should be interesting to see how it plays out in the next couple years how japan's role on uh as as a member of the security council um impacts these types of whaling issues yeah there's a lot of things that play here and uh i find it very interesting of course disappointing uh the u_n_ security council has nothing really to do from my understanding has nothing really to do with sort of conservation and science it's right security council looking at international security and and global security that the u_n_ looks after however uh i think that the sticky point here is that you know back i think it was like two years ago there was or maybe less than that the u_n_ ruled that what that that even though japan said they were doing scientific research in this whaling it didn't really follow the scientific research their process didn't really follow the scientific research they were just whaling you know that's that's what they basically concluded so then so then japan came out and it really got positive reviews basically saying okay for the i forget what year it was i think it was for the 2014 to 2015 it's this past year yeah they said they weren't going to conduct any kind of hunting but then they're going to resume hunting next year 2015 to 2016 season so the right now they just had uh i think on december 1st they just had four whaling vessels to leave port for the southern ocean and they're allowed to kill up for uh 3333 minky whales each year over the next 12 years so of course a lot of people in the iwc a lot of people uh in the u_n_ a lot of people worldwide are just like you know what the hell like what are you doing you you know we ruled saying you were not allowed to do it there was a commercial moratorium you the research purposes argument is bogus it's been a u_n_ court and they found it's bogus and it's just a lot of other countries are are abstaining from it and they're they're they're uh you know not either are certain countries are still doing it but japan seems to be the one that's in the head of it and the media and they've just been like no we're just going to go ahead and do what we want now you have them on a security council at the u_n_ so they've dis disobeyed and disregarded a u_n_ ruling that they're whaling is not part of research now they come up on a u_n_ security council you almost wonder do they even though they're not really related the implications are are you know if you don't agree with something that the security council can do are you just going to go ahead and do something anyway you know what i mean like it's like how do we know we can trust you on these really now they are not like i they believe it's non-permanent member so they can't really veto anything and they're still part of it they're one of ten nations that are part of this and i think it's five nations that get veto power that are perfect and so and i think the elections happen every two years but it's just like this just a sticky point for environmentalist conservation and countries like australia and new zealon who are australia i think is seeking they've they've threatened to seek legal action against uh against japan for what they're doing with the whaling so you know you've got a lot of sticky points in there the u_s_ canada they won't say if they voted for having this the japan on the security council so i think that's really the sticky point is whether you can trust them or not on the other hand it's a security council you know do you do you do you do you make sure japan doesn't get a part of any u_n_ aspect because of what they're doing with the whaling or do you say no the u_n_ security council is a little bit different than sort of this science and wailing a conservation council it's very important for japan to be a part of this um you know especially what's happening in that region you know you want to be a part of this it's it's it's a little bit different so you know maybe those countries like no you gotta have them on that maybe they haven't been on in a while so let's have them on and let's see what they have maybe they could make up for what they're doing i don't know but you know i think i think they have to establish a trust with these other countries saying no we can actually be on this on the security council and actually contribute and listen um but they're not like i guess the the hypocritical part is they're not the only country who's disregarded the u_n_ sanction or a u_n_ ruling um you know aka iraq wmd's you know i don't want to bring it up i'm not a not a u_n_ citizen so i don't want to bring it up i know that that's a sticky point but they're not the only country and you know can i really screwed the pooch you know for ten years in terms of of climate change action with the u_n_ and u_n_ and u_n_ and everything like that but they're probably on the security council so there are a lot of nations who haven't always agreed with the u_n_ and the u_n is not really a legal body that can really hand down sanctions so there's a lot of you know there's a lot of political uh there's a lot of politics going on here but i can see the reasons why people wouldn't want them on just because of their wailing and their disregard for the u_n_ already um but i just can't see them being voted off like you said it just it just doesn't doesn't make sense you know what i mean yeah i'm i think you're right there's so many other things at play and there's a lot of situations where the u_n_ just doesn't seem to have any teeth to do anything yeah um and as far as like sanctions go for for this type of activity so yeah i mean you and i and the environment of communities obviously going to be upset about this it's it's not a good thing that they just kind of seem to have a blatant disregard for this one u_n_ ruling and yet they're in a position of authority it does come down to trust you know it's it's again it's a security council they're not a permanent member what can they really do right you know what i don't know exactly what their role would be um but it is kind of just disheartening to to see that you know they if they recently have gone against this isn't something that japan has you know um historically done but in the last ten or fifteen years they really cut down on it they're still doing a lot of the um what the u_n_ determined is is the illegal wailing essentially and they've recently been put on an authority they've recently given an authority position within the u_n_ so it's frustrating i i agree there's so many other things at play it's certainly you know not surprising to see this happen there's a lot of other great things that japan can contribute to the u_n_ um but from a environmental point of view it would be it's a little disheartening to see not as strong of a stance taken on this as there should be yeah i i i agree i mean but that you know that i think that's the u_n_ you know the u_n_ is is great and it's frustrating at the same time and i think we've seen that time and time again and this is one of those cases where i don't know for me i can't see you denying a country like office security counsel but i understand the implications like do you trust them because they've already disobeyed something you said in the first place so and and they're very strategic about this wailing to japan they're not you know they're they're not taking this lightly they've been doing it they've used a lot of loopholes they've got other countries involved in the iwc to vote for them by you know oh yeah and all of a sudden those little countries get some kind of building donated to them by by japan and and things like that so they're very they're very sneaky about that but like i said they're not the only country that does that kind of stuff and and uh i find a lot of us are very you know a lot of our western countries are very hypocritical and in calling them out and they're trying to serve on other bodies and trying to do other things and i think we have to be in canada is the same we do the same thing and i think we have to be careful when we do this i don't like the wailing as much as anybody else i think their research uh sort of argument is bogus but it happens and you know hopefully we can keep stopping it and and keep cutting it short and eventually they'll they'll listen so um but let's move on with that story but i i thought that was a great story to talk about and uh let's get into our last one great white sharks everybody loves talk about great white sharks why we put at the end so everybody would listen to all the rest of this stuff which i thought they were great stories but um you know this story here i'll kind of give a breakdown i'll tell you why i like it one it's about sharks we haven't covered sharks in a long time uh two our uh speak of the blue buddy uh david mcguire who's the director of shark stewards is doing an interview for this site uh it's on was it k-a-l-w call k-l-w it's a local radio station yeah and uh you know he's on they they've got a little uh mp3 on there about him talking and and talking about essentially the articles all about where great white sharks are going now and how more people are seeing them and i find it very interesting it's a very interesting article because it talks about distribution i always love articles about species distribution um especially something about sharks that are very mobile and they they move around quite a bit um we've seen it on the Atlantic coast with ocean arch uh who uh tag great white sharks and we see them do a lot of tagging you see these sharks go from you know jacksonville florida the beach of jacksonville florida and even down in miami and they go all the way up to cape cod sometimes to the atlantic uh midridge you know it's just they're everywhere and they they travel quite a bit and we never we don't know a lot about their migration patterns until now we started to track them and now we're starting to see them move away from specific areas and this uh david mcguire talks about how normally they're in the fairland islands i think it is it's like a a series of islands where they feed on elephant seals and sea lions and they're not there anymore they're not there this year anyway and i find it interesting it's interesting article where they're saying where are these sharks where are they going in the earlier this year i believe it was summer maybe late spring where they found them and we did i did an article on this where they found them along popular beach areas and people were kind of freaking out they're like oh my god there's great white sharks everywhere there was a video of a shark attacking a sea lion just off the dock of um of of alcatraz which is a big tourist spot there were there was a boat just leaving alcatraz and there's still people on the dock and they all saw this thing pop out of nowhere and it was on video and it made the news we discussed it i think we discussed it did you did you see that video i think so right yeah we did a post about it yeah think yeah we did and and it was just an awesome uh an awesome thing like it was just it was kind of cool to see a shark feed out of nowhere um but people were freaking out and and Dave Naguayan and and a lot of people that he works with organized um a swim from alcatraz to the beach uh to show that there's nothing to be worried about in that water which i thought was a pretty cool move pretty gutsy uh but i don't know if i would be able to do it but i think he tried to prove a point that look just because you're in the water doesn't mean you're going to get eaten by a shark that shark was feeding off a sea lion which is its normal prey you know and yes they're big sharks but let's you know let's not to let's not be too worried about it um but what the article really focused on is are we seeing more sharks or they're just more photos of sharks or are there more sharks in specific areas and you know i have my thoughts on it but i want to hear your thoughts on this uh on this nathan what do you think do you think there's more sharks in the area do you think there's just more photos what what are your thoughts uh well it's it's difficult to tell because it sounds like the the science as far as their movements and and migrations isn't really in yet to say if there's more or not um like like a lot of things in science it's probably a combination of both um that the you know there's the warming that's going on the pacific between the El Nino and the blob right now um that is changing most likely changing the not only the foraging range but also just the range of suitable habitat for for white sharks out there so they're probably exploring different areas um they're most likely following their prey too so you know as sea lions and and other things that they feed on as they shift their movements the white sharks are going to follow them because they're going to go where the food's going um so that could from from a geographic point of view that could be one reason why there may be more in certain areas or just sharks that are already in these areas but you see them more because they're getting closer to shore or they're engaging you know if there's less prey available they might be more aggressive going after food so they might go into shallower areas than they normally do um you know if i'm starving i'm probably gonna make more of a scene when there's food around me too because i'm hungry and i and i haven't eaten in a while and i'm not thinking logically so um you know it could be a combination of of all of those things i think um people just also have more access to videos and phones and and photos uh cameras now than they did five ten years ago um there's been more of a push to to catalog these things and you know there's a lot of citizen science projects out there that can use shark photos or shark sightings for research so people may be thinking more about that too so uh you know it's probably a combination of sharks are moving to to different areas than they historically have they might be moving to close areas closer to shore to follow prey and people are just more uh aware of of these types of events yeah and i think the technology is there now too and we discussed this before the interview where before we started recording where you know before if i say i was in san francisco i wish i lived in san francisco because i'm a huge niner fan but i don't but so i was in san francisco uh people would come if people came out to me like oh i i saw a great white shark i'm like oh cool we're like do you have photos and they said no but i know it's a great white shark i'm like well how did you know because if you think about it when you go when you see a whale a whale actually will come out of the water and even then it's hard to see if they just come up for a breath sharks have no real reason to come out of the water come to the surface unless they're feeding or there's something there they're checking something out they don't need to breathe out of the water so it's very difficult to see a shark from the surface at a distance then it is unless they really pop out of the water like they did at the alcatraz incident so it's very difficult to see it so i don't know if i would trust somebody as much especially someone who maybe doesn't know how to identify sharks a lot you know just because it's huge doesn't mean it's a great white shark or you might see a smaller shark and and say well maybe it's a bull shark maybe it's a a tiger shark maybe it's a lemon shark i don't know like i don't know that you know your sharks i don't know if i would be able to identify seeing it like that right so you don't get as much trust you didn't get as much trust back then now if you have a video or a photo you know where if it goes viral or somebody can be like oh yeah that's it or i can send it to a researcher you know at a local university and say hey what what shark is this they can they can maybe identify it i think with that technology in fact everybody has phones or video camera on their phones or whatever and they're using it a lot more and they're taking snaps when they see something like this and they're showing their bodies they're showing people things go viral i think we're we're end up believing it more and we end up and end up seeing more sharks that doesn't say there might be more sharks um you know great white sharks aren't endangered species but they are protected at the same time so hopefully we're seeing that trend go up but i think also they shift just like you said their prey will shift because now it's warming water you know we've already seen sea lions die because of of a shift in their of their prey they're eventually eventually going to move it's an evolutionary process it's survival the fit is the ones that move will survive and and chase after their prey so of course sharks are going to move up and they're going to move around they're going to move where their prey is they're going to move where their food is and uh i hear you man like if you're starving and you want food you're going to attack it more aggressively i've told there's no rules yeah i've attacked a pizza i've attacked a burger aggressively you do it's not a pretty sight not a pretty sight at all and uh but you know not now i have to say i i have also attack i've also attacked a salad pretty pretty viciously too at times but oh after our discussion today i'm going to attack more salad yeah exactly exactly but don't gently approach a steak but i'll attack a salad that's so that's right but you know it's it's one of those things where things move and i think that's where we don't know these patterns um in the article there's uh uh the guy's name is Taylor chapel i believe his name is from a Stanford researcher who's tagging white sharks now out in the Fairlawn Islands and and for the past decades so now we're seeing more patterns and hopefully the date of this year will kind of look at how the warming pacific is actually changing their patterns if it is changing at all so we see a lot of anecdotal one-off sightings it doesn't mean that there's a whole shift in trends and it doesn't mean that they're moving we just may see them last they might be moving who knows um only the data will be able to tell and hopefully uh Taylor Chappell's uh chapels uh sorry um tagging will show us what's happening and i think there'll be kind of a cool thing to see so i look forward to seeing that data maybe we can get him out on the on the podcast to talk more about that but um yeah i think that's uh one of those things where you know i don't think we need to worry about it too much but the fact that you know one thing that David McGuire said in this article is the fact that people are seeing them in the wild and not on tv where there's no background music or no baritone voice like trying to freak people out and you're just seeing them with no noise and the just you know the movement of the water and just seeing them it's just it he says you're gonna grow more of a respect and appreciation for and the fact that if somebody can see a great white shark in in the wild that's a cool thing that's a bucket list for me i'd love to see one you know in in uh whether i'd be diving in a cage or on top on the surface i'd love to see one and just live because i think i'd be you know i'd fall in love right away so it'd be a love at first sight i'll tell you that right now love at first sight with a great white shark um but yeah i think it was a great article i think it was it was nice to see people talking about distribution shifts and are we seeing more i you know are we seeing more photographs of them is there an increase in that or just maybe maybe there's just you know it's california a lot of people are out nowadays you know they're an outdoor people and they're they use the water quite a bit so even though it's cold they use the water quite a bit and maybe they're just more people out there with their phones and and taking picks and snapping picks when they see them so i like to see more sharks it'd be kind of cool to see that it'd be interesting to see this this data come out on these tagging to see this year if there is has been a change in trend in terms of distribution yeah there's there's so much that we that we don't know still about like you know something as charismatic as a great white shark you would think that we know a lot about it but um for for all of the research that we talk about that you know ends with a pretty pretty nice conclusion like the you know the study learned this the researchers learned this there's so many unanswered questions out there that hopefully it will inspire a lot of people to you know try hard in science and math and and work towards studying these types of animals because the more more people we get studying them the more awareness we can get um from a community point of view at the better we can protect and manage them and um there's there's so many more opportunities to learn great things about these types of animals so yeah absolutely and and i'll tell you uh david mcguire and his shark stewards have been doing a great job in contributing and planning and organizing citizen science projects and and we have an episode with him during shark week last year where he talked about shark stewards and the work that he does so we'll we'll uh we'll go back and we'll get that link and we'll we'll share it with with on the on the uh show notes for today which is speak up for blue dot com forward slash session 70 um and people can take a look at that uh that interview and listen to that interview because he was a he was a great guy and hopefully he'll be our next i'm hoping shark stewards will be our next partner so working with him he goes away a lot so it's hard to get ahold of him but um we're hoping that he'll be our next partner in our future our future work with him so um yeah so that's that's do you have any last any last words on today's uh today's articles no go go scuba diving yes find some more harm this time of year take a vacation go go swim in for a little bit send us pictures yeah absolutely send us pictures of all the wildlife you see see if we can identify them that would be that would be interesting um but yeah no this is this has been great um you know this is ocean talk fries where we discuss stuff we get different points of view from each other sometimes we change our minds during the you know what we discussed at the beginning and then during the episode which kind of happened to me today um discussing the whole meat thing and conservation um but i think it's it's fun it's it's a good way of doing things and to be honest i'd like to do more of this kind of stuff and that's why on monday uh december 14th this next monday in a in a few days you're listening to us on friday we record this on wednesday where you listen to us friday we're starting a crowdfunding campaign and what we want to do is we want to increase the amount of time we get to spend researching the articles spending time on the articles and adding to the articles uh for this podcast that we bring you just just more in-depth information uh for the podcast so right now we're doing this on our own time uh you know we do two three hours a night and we spend a lot of time on it and we want to spend more time but you know we want to alleviate some of that time so the crowdfunding campaign on December 14th through patreon.com and i'll share the link on on monday allows us to spend more time and and really develop more things we're talking you know in the future once we hit certain goals that's what this patreon.com allows us to do allows crowd funders to say okay we want you to achieve these specific monetary goals so you can add to it you know eventually one of our goals is is to kick off a digital magazine that nathan and i have been discussing for the last few months and we're pretty excited about it but there's a lot of cost involved there's a lot of time involved and we want to spend that time and and uh we can do that with your help with your support if you want to see more of that um you'll get access to those magazines of course and you get access to us with extra videos and all this kind of stuff and we also want to add video to this podcast go to sites look at different projects that are going on and sharing that with you so you can see that a lot of people are contributing to ocean conservation and all the different projects the way they're contributing so um you can do that by going to patreon.com i will share the link on monday um and the best thing would be is if you're going to support there's a lot of different levels you can support at incentives at different levels if you go out and support right at the beginning show your support for this community so we can build this community and show others that you know you find this is important so if you're going to support do it on monday um anything that you can contribute is awesome i know it starts the level that i've set started a dollar and then anything in between from a dollar five dollars ten dollars twenty five fifty hundred and five hundred dollar levels so it's all you know depending on what what how what you feel comfortable with and it's per month so just just keep that in mind but uh yeah monday december december fourteenth is uh great way to support this this podcast and this community and build this community so um i appreciate that in advance if you can go out and support this podcast so but that's it for us today i really appreciate this uh you guys listening to this uh this podcast and sharing it and with all your friends and family and your social networks um but yeah so have a great friday you've been listening to speak up a new podcast with me and your luen is your host and our guest host today is nathan johnson happy friday happy conservation so