Findings in Dolphin Mortality Event in Peru

By Hardy Jones

I've just spoken with Dr. Carlos Yaipen Llanos in Lima. He has found no evidence of virus or disease such as brucellosis in the dolphins stranded along the coast of northern Peru. He has found indications of internal trauma including indications of rapid ascent. But he emphasized he did not know the cause of this. Many have blamed seismic testing by oil companies but the UME began before the oil companies began testing in 2012. I'm awaiting a full report from him.

Happier news is that the Peruvian Congress summoned Carlos to testify and they were highly alarmed and indicated they would take strong action against deliberate killing of dolphins for food. They are looking at other measures to protect dolphins in Peruvian waters.

 Hardy Jones of BlueVoice.org and Dr. Carlos Yaipen Llanos with dead baby dolphin

It is becoming clear that the pelican mortality is due to starvation probably linked to the el nino/la nina cycle.


More shortly.

Conclusion as to Cause of Dolphin Mortality East Coast USA

During the late 1980s a massive die-off of bottlenose dolphins took place first in New Jersey and moved along the entire eastern seaboard, ending finally at Cape Canaveral. Hundreds of dead dolphins were found, many others were never counted. Below is the conclusion of the multidisciplinary committee that investigated this dreadful event.

My book contains the entire story, politics, bureaucracy and unanswered questions.

 

The process of reviewing evidence and getting it peer-reviewed takes time. In September 1994, I received a report of the conclusions of the interagency team that had gathered in Beaufort, North Carolina, with additional experts to bring together all information produced by investigations into the die-off. The report concluded, “The results for the beach-cast specimens (dead dolphins) obviously reflect the levels of contaminants in the nearshore environment where the dolphins accumulate these substances.” 

But no definitive answer was ever found. 

Dolphin Hunting Season Ends at Taiji - Reason for Hope?

  There is potentially good news from Taiji. The number of dolphins killed this year was 615. Half of last year.
  They are ending the hunting season Feb 28, which is the normal ending time for the hunt on dolphins (Iruka). But last year when they came up short of their quota they got an extension to make up for the deficit. This year they did not ask for one. The question now is whether they will continue to hunt gondo (pilot whales, Rissos, melonheads – i.e. what they call small whales but we in the west classify as dolphins). By tradition they hunt them through April. If they do not hunt them it would be a good sign. But as in all things related tdo Taiji I urge caution. 
  The most likely cause of this decline in take is that there is less demand. But it is also possible that water temperatures have moved the most often taken species to different waters in search of prey. Distribution of fish is mostly governed by water temperature. A final possibility is that the prized species have become depleted and are difficult to find.
   There were also 160 dolphins taken for captivity during the past season.
   I believe the best course of action for BlueVoice is to continue to test dolphins and dolphin eaters for contamination and publish that information to depress the demand for dolphin meat.

Mortality Rate in Dolphin Eating Taiji Town

Japan's National Institute of Population and Social Security Research has cited mortality figures in Taiji, for 2007, at 67 deaths from a population of some 3,500 residents — putting the town's overall mortality rate more than 50 percent above other villages nationwide of roughly the same population. However Kozagawa, west of Taiji, where dolphin meat is also consumed, showed an even higher rate — with 82 deaths from a population of 3,426 people in 2007.

Reporting the Dolphin Slaughter Live from Taiji

In 2001 I went to Taiji ready to do audiocasts coupled with video from the scene of the dolphin slaughters. I'm posting this so those fighting for the lives of the dolphins today will have some perspective on what has been tried before and how it worked out. The following segment if from The Voice of the Dolphins.

By Hardy Jones

The story begins on the first day of our finding about 40 pilot whales netted off in Hatagajiri Bay.

I phoned my first report to a voice-mail box at Humane Society of the United States (HSUS). It would be coupled with the pre-staged video and stills and go out on The Animal Channel within a few hours. The first Internet report brought an audience of unique visitors numbering fifteen thousand within twelve hours. In my report, I asked everyone listening to protest to Japanese embassies and the fishing cooperative in Taiji.

Meanwhile, the fishermen were nowhere to be seen. Sakae walked into town and learned from the woman running the dolphin meat shop that they were discussing what to do about us.

Day two was sunny. We monitored the bay against any attempt to kill the pilot whales. If they were going to die, we were going to film it. Watching a large male protectively circling the females and calves was agonizing for me. I had a slim hope that we could force the fishermen to release them but, in reality, knew they would eventually return with their long knives.

Later in the day, the boat used in the slaughter returned to Hatajiri Bay. It moved among the pilot whales, and suddenly, a man on the bow thrust a spear into the body of one of them. It writhed briefly and then went still. Moments later, the process was repeated. Both whales were then secured by rope to the side of the boat and dragged back to Taiji town for butchering. I filmed the entire process from a hidden position atop the cliff on the north side of the bay. What the fishermen were trying to avoid by this time consuming procedure was any grizzly slaughter footage emerging from Taiji.

I continued to file audio reports. The audience built with each passing hour until we had reached three hundred thousand unique visitors. A tsunami of protest faxes and calls pounded Japanese embassies around the world.

And then the typhoon hit with a vengeance. That night I lay on my futon bed on the straw mat floor thinking of the terror of the whales. Sleep was fitful when it came.

On the morning of the third day, I awoke at 4:30 and, carrying my video camera, left the hotel alone. The killing bay was quiet— only the pilot whales’ percussive breathing what I feared would be their last breaths. I walked along the southern arm of the bay to a point where I could see the incoming storm pushing huge waves against the rocky shore. Rain was falling almost horizontally in wind-driven sheets, but the temperature was mild.

As I turned back toward the road, a little white van appeared. It turned and the headlights hit me straight on. They knew I was there. They clambered out of the cab and started removing their implements of slaughter. Without thinking much about it, I walked toward them, camera running on my hip. They didn’t seem to know what to do, but as I passed among them, I said “Sayonara.” I’m not sure why. One of them growled something that Sakae later translated as “Sayonara, my ass. You know what we’re doing, and you’ll be back.”

Back at the hotel, Larry and Sakae joined me, and we went out the rear door and took a coastal path to reach the ocean side of the killing bay. We climbed a steep stone stairway to a vantage point a couple of hundred feet above the bay. By the time we got there, the killing had begun. The fishermen were stabbing individual pilot whales, then roping their tails and dragging them to the beach to cut their throats and let them bleed out. I crawled out on a rock promontory and began shooting video. Rain was intense, and I wondered how long my Sony camera would hold out.

For a moment, I imagined what the pilot whales must be experiencing: held for days in confusion and terror, concerned for their babies and fellow pod members, then suddenly forced into a confined space and stabbed, roped and hauled to the beach to face their executioners. For most of the time, they would be conscious and feeling excruciating pain. The second rank to be killed would be hearing the cries of those first taken. Soon, the taste of the blood of their pod mates would reach those awaiting the same fate.

But I could think and grieve later. The job of the moment was to record the images. Looking through the lens puts distance between the cameraman and the horror. You have to focus and get the light right and make sure you have sufficient battery charge and tape to carry the whole shoot. But the massacre was registering in me, stored in a momentarily remote place from which it would erupt in later days and nights. I had watched these pilot whales for three days, and this felt very personal.

Suddenly we heard a guttural cry and several fishermen appeared behind us. “What the hell are you doing! You people are a pain in the ass,” they screamed in Japanese.

Larry and I tried to continue taping, but our main concern became safeguarding the video we’d already taken. The mission of these men was to get it from us. We demanded to go to the police, but the fishermen laughed and said, “Fine; they’re our friends.” So we decided against that.

The fishermen carried long poles they use to prod the whales and wore hard hats that they swung at us. I decided the best way to get out of this confrontation was to move to a more public area, so I suggested to Sakae and Larry that we agree to accompany the fishermen down the hill toward the main road and the hotel, pretending to be following their instructions. As we descended, Larry and I discussed what to do.

When I got near the bottom of the stone stairs, I looked back at Larry. He made a signal that he would roll tape, and I made a break for the hotel. A young, heavy-set guy hit me with his hard hat, crouched into a sumo-like stance, and tried to block my way. Crossing the several hundred yards to the hotel in wet jeans was like running through glue. The fisherman kept trying to push me backwards. I made slow progress by putting out my arms like a bird drying its wings and then rolling off him to gain a few steps. I felt like an NBA forward working through a tough defense. My adversary smiled and yelled, “Ah, basketball!” We both laughed. What kind of confrontation was this? A few yards farther on, he hit me particularly hard with his hard hat, then apologized. “Gomenasai”—“So sorry.” Only in Japan!

Larry caught up to me at the entrance to the hotel. We went through the front door like a running back and his blocker. Sakae followed. The fisherman ran into the lobby after us, screaming violently but we managed to get into our rooms and lock the doors.

It seemed apparent that no further videotaping could be done in Taiji. Outside our hotel windows, the typhoon howled, and we were not about to walk back into the hands of the fishermen. What was paramount was to get the video material on the Internet as soon as possible. This would not save the pilot whales now dead or dying in Hatajiri Bay, but perhaps we could thwart the next capture. We didn’t know on whose side the police in Taiji would come down. At all costs, we did not want our videotape confiscated.

With today’s technology—an iPod, for instance—I could have shot video and e-mailed it to HSUS in Washington or uploaded to YouTube. But in 2001, we had to get to a Hyatt hotel in Osaka to transmit via an Ethernet connection.

Two Years After the Cove - Taiji Still Hunting Dolphins

 By Hardy Jones, photo by Dieter Hagman, Atlantic Blue

Nearly two years have passed since The Cove won an Academy Award. There was great hope that the force of the film would end the killing at Taiji. It has not. Fishermen continue to “harden” the cove. A new slaughterhouse has been built, indicating the fishermen have no intention of stopping their brutal business. They believe, according to a highly knowledgeable Japanese expert, that they have “defeated The Cove.” There are some noteworthy changes at Taiji this fall. The number of dolphins killed is significantly down and the main victims have been Risso’s Dolphins. We are investigating why this is so. It may be that warming ocean temperatures are redistributing dolphin prey. Where the prey goes dolphins must follow. BlueVoice is investigating.

The following is a report from Dieter Hagmann, German director of AtlanticBlue and admin for BlueVoice’s European website. BlueVoice contributed funds to Dieter’s mission.

Dieter Hagmann Taiji Report 11/11

I think the new constructions are a reaction to the observation from the last season, especially the observation with the hidden camera in January this year. http://bluevoice.org/webfilms_killingattaiji.php

The new tarp area in front of the old one is for me a note that the fishermen plan to extend the protection of the cove. According to my observations, the new tarps are not in use until now. Perhaps the new tarps will only be used for big slaughters in the future.

A further new construction is the area on the left side of the cove. It consists of metal posts and wire mesh. On the top there are wooden slats. The fisherman had big problems with jumping dolphins in this area in the past. I believe that the reason for this construction is to avoid the dolphin jumping on the rocks in this area. I documented this several times, last in January this year. Especially the Striped Dolphins have the behavior to jump on the rocks in panic. I think the fishermen will do anything to avoid cruel records and documentations. Both constructions - the new tarp rows and the new construction wall on the left will help the fisherman in future to obstruct the documentations. Additionally I will send you a picture with the entrance door of the cove area. This door is also new constructed and over two meters high.

It seems to me that the fisherman will continue the killing in the future.

My work in Taiji was difficult. I was observed every day by police. The police checked me several times on the tsunami hill or in the area next to the hill. Two times they controlled (searched) my body for illegal devices. They found nothing... It is not forbidden to go on the tsunami hill, but it is not allowed to go behind the fences on tsunami hill. The police have seen me countless times on the hill, but never in an illegal action.

Hardy’s question:
“It seems all they are only killing are Risso’s dolphins. Do you know why that might be. Also the number of dolphins killed is very low."

According to my observations so far only Risso's dolphins were caught and killed. On 13 November, however, two rough-toothed dolphins trapped but not killed. They were released (no license to kill).

Hardy note: After Dieter's writing a pod of Striped Dolphins was massacred.

Why only Risso's dolphins? I do not know. I'm sure that other species are not spared. Maybe time will only be won until the conversion work completed in the cove. Until then, perhaps only Risso's dolphins are killed. Risso's dolphins are not "Flipper"-dolphins ... you know what I mean ...

Hardy Note: It is possible that changing water temperatures are causing other species – bottlenose and pilot whales – to seek food in areas away from Taiji. We can only pray. If you read my Blog on Iki you’ll have seen that dolphins, once so plentiful at Iki Island, Japan are no longer found there. http://hardyjonesdolphins.com/blog.html October 3, 2011

Yesterday I sent you a video with my best scenes from Taiji. I hope you have no problem to download the file (1 GB). You can use the video for your work.

Hardy: Great thanks to Dieter for his courage and tenacity

Hardy Note: will be posting this video shortly

 

Dolphin Altruism: Dolphins Save Me From Hammerhead Shark

The following video and blog are recounted in my book The Voice of the Dolphins. They document four spotted dolphins protecting me from a hammerhead shark. This material is posted in support of PETA's lawsuit to expand the rights of killer whales. 

Perhaps the most compelling evidence of how the dolphins felt about us came in 1985 late in the afternoon after a day of filming. Howard Hall, Julia, and other members of the underwater crew had climbed aboard the Zodiak that covered us as we worked at any distance from the main boat. I lingered at the surface, enjoying the delirious late afternoon light, my camera hanging in my right hand. The blue skies above held huge, gleaming white cumulous clouds, and toward the western horizon, blazing orange rays of sunlight shone out of the sea. The water temperature was in the high eighties. I lay on my back and experienced bliss.

Half a dozen young spotted dolphins, including a band of juveniles we’d named the Gang of Four, swam slowly over the sandy bottom thirty feet below. Occasionally, one dolphin would bite another on the tail and begin a brief, friendly tussle consisting of darting, twisting, and jaw snapping. But mostly they were grazing for bottom fish.

In the distance, at the limit of visibility, another sleek, gray creature appeared, swimming in an unusual, sine-wave manner and hugging the bottom. Its tail was not stroking up and down; it was slashing from side to side. The tail fin was vertical, and the head broad and flat. This wasn’t a dolphin. It was a very large Atlantic hammerhead shark, one of the few shark species that will attack humans. The shark moved toward me, angling first to one side then the other as though following a scent, probably mine. It was swinging its eyeballs, stuck out on the extremities of the head, so as to see its target first with one eye, then the other, perhaps to gauge distance. I didn’t feel comfortable presenting the hammerhead with the sight of my dangling legs, so I jackknifed and dove toward the bottom, raising my camera. Not only was this a unique chance to document the behavior of dolphins around sharks but raising the camera also served to put some metal between the fast-approaching predator and me.

The shark was grayish brown and about eleven feet long. I could judge its size easily because it was twice the length of the subadult dolphins swimming nearby. It undulated across the bottom, its movements now excited and menacing. I’d been diving with hammerheads in the Pacific on numerous occasions and had never felt threatened, but Atlantic hammerheads have a nasty reputation, and this one displayed the agonistic postures that precede an attack.

I hung in the water five feet over the bottom, and sooner than usual, my lungs began to ache for air. In a moment, I’d have to return to the surface. The shark turned directly toward me and accelerated with a flick of its tail. It happened so quickly that I could only react by pulling my camera tight against my body, poised to thrust it against the shark’s sensitive rostrum if it struck at me. I turned the camera on.

Suddenly the undersea world came alive with high-pitched whistles and intense sonar bursts. Two juvenile dolphins, Chopper and Stubby, appeared over my left shoulder. I flinched as I felt the wash they created streaking through the water straight for the hammerhead. In an instant, two buddies joined them, bolting in from the right.

The Gang of Four worked as a unit, diving and turning in unison like a squadron of fighter planes flying precision maneuvers.

The hammerhead saw the onrushing dolphins and, looking harassed and perplexed, jerked to the side, away from me. With powerful beats of their tail flukes, the dolphins launched themselves toward the shark’s head, clicking and whistling intensely, turning away only at the last instant. Again and again the juvenile dolphins dived at the hammerhead, mobbing it the way sparrows do a hawk, using sonar bursts to attack the shark’s lateral lines, a highly sensitive component of the shark sensory system, disorienting the huge fish.

The shark now wanted nothing more than to escape from this sudden torment. It turned one way then another but the Gang of Four were allowing it to move only in one direction—away from me. The hammerhead disappeared into the blue-green distance, and the dolphins, now tremendously excited, swam for the surface to do a series of victory leaps. One after another, they launched themselves through the surface, reentering instants later. After perhaps half a dozen leaps, Chopper cruised up to me, whistling intensely. I swam with him at the surface, trying my best to move in a way that showed the same kind of exuberance he’d displayed, but my human body dragged in the water and he had to restrain himself to stay with me. He was too excited to maintain the slow pace and darted off with his friends.

I was frankly glad to have footage of the dolphins saving me from the hammerhead. Without it, there might have been quite a bit of skepticism about this event. Some people just don’t want to admit animals are capable of altruism.  

The Voice of the Dolphins is available at Amazon: http://amzn.to/klnDw0 Kindle: http://amzn.to/pVszfc
Enhanced version with embedded video is at iTunes/iBooks http://bit.ly/nmb5v4 

The Chilling Tale of What Stopped Dolphin Slaughters at Iki, Japan

 

By Hardy Jones

The first awareness of dolphin slaughters in Japan came at Iki Island, located in the Straights of Tsushima, off southwestern Japan. In 1978 a news photographer from Mainichi Television took helicopter shots of a bay whose waters ran red with the blood of hundreds of dolphins. The pictures caused widespread outrage as they were transmitted around the world.  I saw those photographs and vowed to do something about it.

In 1979 and 1980, I led Howard Hall and other filmmakers to Iki to attempt to bring an end to the killing by exposing the barbarity on film. These efforts are recounted in my book, The Voice of the Dolphins. What was not included in the book was what happened in the years that followed.

In 1979 we filmed interviews with the islanders, particularly Mr. Harada Susumu, president of the young fishermen’s cooperative. But we did not witness a slaughter – only the grim aftermath of dead dolphin bodies

In 1980 Howard Hall and I filmed the unspeakable slaughter of hundreds of dolphins at Iki. I jumped the first flight off the island to get the footage to CBS News in Tokyo where it was satellited around the world.  After the huge international uproar caused by broadcast of the film we had taken of the butchery of bottlenose, pseudorca and Risso’s dolphins, Nagasaki prefecture withdrew the permit for the Iki Islanders to hunt dolphins later in 1980. There is an individual who claims he negotiated the end to the Iki Island dolphin massacres in 1982 but that was long after the permit to hunt dolphins had been withdrawn so there was nothing to negotiate. The people responsible for shutting down the dolphin hunts were those who stood in the bloody waters of Iki Island and filmed the killing; and Dexter Cate who kayaked into the killing zone at night and cut nets in an attempt to allow dolphins to escape. Dexter was arrested and spent months in a Japanese jail before being declared persona non-grata and expelled from Japan permanently. But his trial kept the world focused on the deadly events at Iki for months.

But for two occasions, one in the middle 1980s and one in 1994, the killings at Iki ended. In those two years special permits were issued to hunt dolphins at the request of the dolphin captivity industry. Dozens of dolphins went into captivity. Hundreds died.

In 2004 I returned to Iki and learned the full story of what had happened after I released the slaughter film. I tracked down Mr. Harada, whom I’d met in 1979. He told me that in the day after I left Iki in ‘79 (to get the film footage safely to CBS News in Tokyo) more than 200 journalists had descended on the island. Iki Island became infamous worldwide – a symbol of brutality to animals and shame for Japan. This massive media turn out was part of what caused the permit to capture dolphins to be withdrawn in 1980.

During my 2004 visit I videotaped an interview with the former head of the Katsumoto Fishing Cooperative, the organization that carried out the dolphin hunts, I learned a perverse irony – where once thousands of dolphins migrated by the island, today there are none. More perversely still, the fishermen who had once attempted to eradicate dolphins now wish they had could find and catch them for the lucrative aquarium trade. But there are none. Dolphins have vanished from the waters off Iki. And why is that?

Is it because the fish stocks that constituted dolphin prey have been decimated forcing the dolphins to seek food elsewhere? Is it because warming waters around the island have changed prey distribution and thus moved the dolphins elsewhere? Is it possible the dolphins learned to avoid the waters off Iki Island? Or is it because the dolphins that once migrated past Iki were simply wiped out? Any or all of these is possible.

Another shocking revelation came from the union official Sakae Hemmi and I interviewed in 2004. Standing in a room whose shelves and tables were covered with every imaginable form of dolphin statuette, plate, cup, kite or statue, he said the true reason they stopped hunting dolphins was that it was too costly to bury them. “Burying hundreds of dolphins is not cheap.” My mind chilled at the words. So the tale of what really ended the killing at Iki mimics Rashomon. Everyone sees the story through their own lens, the focus defined by memory or loss of it, ego, and fund raising strategies. And in some cases the pursuit of the truth.

My purpose in writing this blog is to illustrate the complexity of westerners trying to bring about change in Japan. More than a year after the tsunami of protest brought about by the film The Cove, dolphin hunts are still carried out at Taiji. After countless petitions and calls for boycotts the killer boats still sortie after dolphins.

Where I am putting my efforts and those of BlueVoice is into testing dolphin meat and publishing the results in order to drive down the market for the meat and make the drives financially unviable.

The story of our work at Iki in 1979 including lessons for those fighting to end the dolphin hunts in Japan is in The Voice of the Dolphins. http://hardyjonesdolphins.com/

MacIntosh to Dolphins. Do You Read Me?

The following blog is an excerpt from The Voice of the Dolphins. It's an account of our second effort in 2004 to communicate with dolphins by computer and yielded surprising results. For more on The Voice of the Dolphins go to http://hardyjonesdolphins.com.

The computer communication system John Ross had devised produced some interesting results during the final days of the trip. I joined John standing on the white sand bottom in about fifteen feet of water. Dolphins lazed around us. It seemed a silent world except for the inhalation and exhalation of our scuba tanks and some barely audible high frequency clicks and whistles from the dolphins. But when John passed me the frequency shifting headphones, what had seemed to be a piccolo turned into a full symphony orchestra. Once again, I realized that for dolphins, it’s not a silent world but rather a phenomenally rich three-dimensional acoustical universe, each sound conveying meaning, nuance, and vast amounts of information. Humans’ inability to hear dolphins is one of the reasons most experience them as mute.

John transmitted two kinds of calls from the computer. The first was a synthesized call similar in pitch to an actual dolphin whistle but was not the real thing. The dolphins returned that call with a perfect imitation, just as they had in 1978.

Then something surprising happened. John recorded dolphin vocal output and replayed those sounds to the dolphins. They responded not with mimicry but with an original phrase as though attempting to carry on the conversation. Of course, we didn’t know what they had said in the first place or what their reply was to the playback. I don’t delude myself into thinking that our efforts will somehow crack the code of dolphin communication. But there is a meta-message in what is taking place in those turquoise waters over brilliant white sand and that is that both species are interested in the interaction. That is the message and it is huge.