PROBLEM: DOLPHIN-SAFE TUNA SOLUTION: IMPORT TUNA ONLY FROM VESSELS CERTIFIED AND CONTINUOUSLY MONITORED TO HAVE NO SPEEDBOATS (No Speedboats, No Dolphins) TESTIMONEY OF DR. KEN MARTEN, FORMER NATIONAL MARINE FISHERIES SERVICE PORPOISE OBSERVER, AND DOLPHIN RESEARCH BIOLOGIST--FOR U. S. CONGRESS I have served as a National Marine Fisheries Service porpoise observer on tuna boats, and have conducted research on dolphin behavior for 14 years.* I have witnessed and taken detailed data on hundreds of purse-seine sets on dolphins. It should be made clear from the outset that dolphins are not an accidental catch in the tuna purse seine industry. They are chased for approximatley an hour until they are exhausted. Then the mile-long net is set around them. During closure underwater bombs are detonated near the areas where the net is still open to keep the dolphins in the net, that is to prevent the dolphins from escaping from the net (because tuna will escape with them). Thousands of dolphins can be encircled in this way, and all of them can end up dead, especially during equipment breakdowns at night. I have seen hundreds of dolphins die in single sets of the net, and more often than not, the net only had dead dolphins and no tuna. It is obvious from the above description that an annual quota of 5,000 dead dolphins makes no sense, since that many can be killed in a few hours with one bad net set. The best way to enforce the existing law prohibiting the import of tuna which kills dolphins is to require that all tuna boats who provide the tuna be inspected and not be allowed to have speedboats. The speedboats can be replaced with boats of more appropriate velocity--fast enough to carry out efficient net work, but too slow to chase dolphins. (The speedboats on tuna purse seiners are extremely fast--specifically for chasing dolphins.) There are only two functions of speedboats on a tunaboat: to chase dolphins to exhaustion so that the net can be set around them, and to move quickly to areas where the net has not yet closed in order to drop bombs in the water to prevent the dolphins from escaping out of the net. Without speedboats the purse seiners cannot set their nets on dolphins, and any catch they deliver can be guaranteed to be dolphin-safe in that sense. If a quota of 5,000 dead dolphins per year is established, the above standards for prohibiting the setting of nets on dolphins should still be maintained, as the 5,000 would certainly be reached by the number of dolphins which would be killed in not setting the nets intentionally on dolphins (log fishing). Much of the mortality in log fishing results from the fisherman shooting the dolphins in the area with rifles, but considerable mortality can also result from accidental entanglement and death of dolphins living in the vicinity who have survived the shooting. Of course the fishermen don't talk about the shooting--only observers like myself who have seen the fishing hundreds of times firsthand know that it happens. Assuming 14 boats active at any given time, the 5,000 limit would be reached with one "accidental" dolphin death per boat per day--a much lower mortality rate than I have ever seen with log fishing. To put it in simple terms: based on my own observations of hundreds of log sets, a 5,000 per year kill quota would almost certainly be exceeded by log fishing alone even if setting nets on dolphins were completely prohibited. It is worth noting that it is also feasible to catch the tuna without using purse-seining at all, as was done by baitboats before the advent of purse-seining tuna. This avoids even the dolphin mortality of log fishing. Here is a summary of some additional relevant conclusions: 1. CONSEQUENCES OF SETTING TUNA PURSE SEINE NETS ON DOLPHINS With the current technology, if purse seine nets are set on dolphins, dolphins will be killed in large numbers. One tuna boat has the potential to kill more than 5,000 dolphins in a single day. I have witnessed many large kills myself, and in fact when the dead dolphins came up in the net as it was brought in, there were no tuna! (And the dolphins were Eastern Spinners, considered at that time to be dangerously depleted and illegal to set nets on.) Large kills of 5,000 or more in a single net set would be most likely in the case of equipment failure that take the set into the night, when the dolphins, probably deafened by the bombs used to prevent them from escaping out of the net, and thus probably lacking sonar, get entangled by large folds in the net that the fishermen, who can't see and whose equipment has failed, can no longer control. In my experience, such equipment breakdowns and night-time problems were common and almost always resulted in all of the dolphins in the net dying -- and thousands of dolphins can be in the net (And this can occur even if the set started in the morning.) Also, it was during massive kills of this type that the fishermen used the same bombs that they use on the dolphins to keep me from counting and reporting the dead dolphins -- and indeed they deafened me for approximately 24 hours. 2. OBSERVER PROGRAMS The comments below are based on my own experiences as a National Marine Fisheries Sevice porpoise observer working at sea in the tuna purse-seine fishery. As you will see, I consider observer data to be the barest minimum as an estimate of dolphin mortality, and my own experience suggests that dolphin mortality would actually greatly exceed observer reports--probably by at least a factor of 10 or more. It is also worth noting that the current plan is to change to a less rigorous observer program than the one I worked in, rather than a more rigorous one--so the variance with the true kill will become even greater. The point is that I can tell you as an ex-government observer myself that observer kill counts are meaningless. Observer kill counts could only take on meaning if the observer were an enforcement officer who could prosecute the captains, boat owners, and/or crew for illegal activity in dolphin killing and criminal assault directed at the observer, both of which are the norm, and the reason the dolphin death counts are meaningless. If it is decided that tuna nets are to be set on dolphins rather than tuna, and large numbers of dolphin lives are sacrificed as a consequence, it is unrealistic to expect an observer program like the one already in existence to accurately count and report the number of dead dolphins. A quota, therefore, has no meaning. An observer program can count and record dead dolphins accurately only if observers have powers of enforcement. That is, only if they themselves can cite tuna boats and their captains for unlawful conduct. Having been criminally assaulted myself, repeatedly, as a government observer (a captain could demand to see counts), my experience was that high counts lead to powerful coercive behavior (and a captain has total power on his boat), and reporting the true kill is virtually impossible. My own experience leads me to believe that observer reports are probably only a small fraction of the true kill. And I suspect that this disparity is even worse outside of the United States. 3. THE SHOOTING OF DOLPHINS AND WHALES The common practice of getting out the firearms on a boat and shooting all of the rough-toothed dolphins, pilot whales, and false killer whales in the area before setting the nets on a log for skipjack tuna should be banned and enforced. 4. MORAL CONSIDERATIONS People have speculated for decades that the massive extermination of dolphins by the tuna industry might be an immoral act perpetrated on some kind of social, conscious beings. My research on self-awareness in the bottlenose dolphin for the last six years confirms that such a fear does indeed have a scientific basis. An important objective measure of consciousness is what scientists call "self-awarenness", which involves having a concept of self so that, for example, a person or animal can tell that its mirror image is itself and not another individual. Only man and the great apes were thought to posess it. The conclusion of my research is that bottlenose dolphins also appear to belong to this exclusive group of creatures whose consciousness has evolved to the level of "self-awareness" (Marten and Psarakos, 1994; Marten and Psarakos, 1995a; Marten and Psarakos, 1995b; Marten et al., 1996). 5. SOLUTION Although the problem is complex, the solution is disarmingly simple: the only way to get rid of the high mortality of dolphins in the tuna industry is to set tuna nets on tuna, not dolphins. The way to enforce this is to have an efficient, comprehensive program prohibiting speedboats on tuna purse seine boats, including spot inspections at sea. *The 14 years of research referred to at the beginning consisted of 1 1/2 years at the Naval Ocean Systems Center, 6 years on the faculty at the University of California at Santa Cruz, and 6 1/2 years at my own laboratory at Sea Life Park, Hawaii. References Ken Marten and Suchi Psarakos, 1994. Evidence of Self-Awareness in the Bottlenose Dolphin (Tursiops truncatus). In: Self-Awareness in Animals and Humans. Cambridge University Press, pp. 361-379. Ken Marten and Suchi Psarakos, 1995a. Using Self-View Television to Distinguish Between Self-Examination and Social Behavior in the Bottlenose Dolphin (Tursiops truncatus). Journal of Consciousness and Cognition , vol. 4, no. 2, pp. 205-224. Ken Marten and Suchi Psarakos, 1995b. Marten and Psarakos Commentary Response. Journal of Consciousness and Cognition, vol. 4, no. 2, pp. 258-269. Ken Marten, Karim Shariff , Suchi Psarakos, and Don J. White. 1996. Ring Bubbles of Dolphins. Scientific American. August Issue, pp. 82-87.

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