Dolphins at play in Malta, 27 April 2020
(CC-licensed video by Alex Hania)
2 May 2020 (Brussels, Belgium) – A few days ago I posted the above video on Twitter and Linkedin. It blew up: 244,000 hits on Twitter (and still counting) plus 18,000 hits on Linkedin (and still going).
As sea pollution levels have dropped (no pleasure boats, no freighters, etc.), large numbers of dolphins have returned to the waters around Malta after being absent for years. The video was filmed (by my cousin, Alex Hania, using an iPhone 11 Pro) off the coast of Gozo but dolphins have also reappeared in even the (normally) very busy harbor near my home in Sliema, Malta.
Malta maintains a state-of-the-art marine park and research facility for dolphins and sea lions, as well as tropical birds and reptiles. The park has daily shows to give you a better understanding of their lives. Dolphin communication and behavior is extensively studied.
There have always been some “in-the-wild” dolphins around Malta but nothing like the number we are seeing now. Just as we do in Greece (my other home), dolphin movements are plotted based on GPS positions. We *guesstimate* a normal, nearby dolphin population of 50-60 but we rarely see that many. And now? Maybe 150.
I spoke with two Malta-based marine biologists about this phenomena. They explained that dolphins are incredibly sensitive to noise, the auditory cortex of their brains being highly developed. A dolphin auditory nerve is about twice the diameter of the human nerve. Because of this, dolphins are capable of detecting noise and traffic from a great distance. But underwater noise, generated by marine vessels, underwater excavations and construction or pile driving as well as acoustic surveys, can be detrimental to the mammals, causing disturbances which will alter their migratory pathways.
Malta’s harbors and other areas close to shore are populated with fish farms where dolphins would love to feast, but ship and boat traffic keeps them away. Now, they deem it safe to come in and the biologists have seen dolphin pods (groups) come in, not singular dolphins, because it is normally in a pod that will search for food. This comports with a similar event, also off the Gozo coast, a number of years ago. A massive storm swept the shoreline. Ship traffic halted for 3 days. The pods came in.
This species of dolphin inhabits warm and temperate seas and are found everywhere except for the Antarctic Circle and Arctic regions.
Many people on Twitter who watched the video asked me “how high can dolphins jump?!” Aquariums/marine parks train dolphins to jump anywhere from 15-30 ft above the water to put on a show for audiences. In-the-wild? The marine biologists tell me 20 ft jumps are average. And dolphins also jump sometimes for no practical aims whatsoever.
The same thing is happening near my home in Crete. As the pandemic has led to lockdowns, ship and boat traffic has come (almost) to a standstill. Sea turtles are venturing back into the harbors which are usually swamped with shipping traffic. In the video above you’ll see a loggerhead turtle, pretty common across the Crete shoreline.
Yes, COVID-19 has led to the reduction in human activity due to the lockdowns across the world which has resulted in some interesting (and amusing) effects on wildlife. There has been a rewilding of some cities. The following video is just one of many that have collected events from around the world:
Last year I did a self-isolation (in a way), getting off the grid for 3 months. I returned to Crete to continue an ongoing project my wife and I started a number of years ago: volunteer work with a sea turtle research and conservation organization based in Chania which is on a mission to protect endangered sea turtles and their natural habitats. They offer a very unique learning experience to the volunteers who join their efforts, and promote public awareness. To achieve their goals, they operate a science-based research and conservation project in collaboration with local and national authorities. My wife and I volunteer as well as provide funding for their research efforts, and every year we sponsor two oceanography students who will spend part of their summer at the centre.
I needed the silence and space for thoughts to unfurl in whatever direction, undisturbed by the “real” world. I rediscovered my use of paper notebooks and the joy of making lists and diagrams and flow-charts (with four different colored pens!!) and some (pathetic) illustrations. I wanted to use those notebooks … automatic error-correction is never the default … and go over and over the same material, adjusting, correcting, copying out, underlining, coloring . . . the way that tactile, childish and seemingly pointless activities always seem to force you to examine things in every detail, from every available point of view.
For my readings I eschewed anything to do with my work life (AI and computer systems and technology) and turned to climate eschatology, that a warming Earth will radically change life as we know it, that we can’t change it, so let’s just face the adjustments we’ll need to make because we are doomed. Yes, a pessimistic view. I also re-read the work of Rachel Carson (there is a monster of a new compendium out with all her writings) and while everybody knows Silent Spring, it’s her books and articles about the sea … exploring the whole of ocean life from the shores to the depths … that deserve more attention. She was incredibly prescient about what was happening to the seas due to exploitation, and even more so about what she perceived was the growing “government assault on science and nature”.
And she wrote about our plundering of wildlands, disrupting established ecological niches, destroying life cycles. No, she did not write about novel diseases, such as Ebola, HIV, Marburg, and SARS, or human infectious diseases having a zoonotic origin. But she wrote about how humans do not operate within their ecosystems in the same way as other species, even other top-level predators. That we don’t have “an ecological niche” but that we dominate and alter the local ecosystems. That we are part of a massive biosphere … blundering into ecosystems we are part of but destroy.
Much of it all came back to me during the present pandemic lockdown. My media team and I (I have 6 full-time staff but added 6 freelancers) jumped into “everything coronavirus” and so far we produced 60+ articles and client memos (many of these pieces are freely available here). I am venturing onto ground where I’ve no guarantee of safety or of academic legitimacy, so it’s not been my intention to pass myself off as a scholar, nor as someone of dazzling erudition. It has been enough for me to act as a messenger for those who do have knowledge, and offer my own reflections on that knowledge. No doubt the old dream that once motivated Condorcet, Diderot, or D’Alembert has become unrealizable – the dream of holding the basic intelligibility of the world in one’s hand, of putting together the fragments of the shattered mirror in which we never tire of seeking the image of our humanity. But even so, I don’t think it’s completely hopeless to attempt to create a dialogue, however imperfect or incomplete, between the various branches of knowledge effecting and affecting this pandemic.
And, yes, a tsunami of material to read. With a high level of complexity. The unprecedented uncertainty amid the coronavirus pandemic … especially the data … has decimated our carefully laid plans and unsettled our minds at equal pace. This coronavirus, with its health, social, scientific and economic impacts, has made the content production engine of this world go into overdrive, leaving most of us struggling within an infodemic.
As I have noted before, we have entered an age of atomised and labyrinthine knowledge. Many of us are forced to lay claim only to competence in partial, local, limited domains. We get stuck in set affiliations, set identities, modest reason, fractal logic, and cogs in complex networks.
And too many use this new complexity of knowledge as an excuse for dominant stupidity. There is more we do not know about this virus than what we do know. I am going to save all that for another post and just offer a few “Big Picture” take-aways from a long-form essay in progress:
• Everyday you can read stories like “these are the definite changes we’ll see in xxxx industry because of this pandemic” or, “these are the definite changes you’ll see in your life because of this pandemic”. Yet every one of these pundits … every one … only has some version of the “old normal”. And my favorite? We’ll all work remotely. Hey, news flash. “Professionals only need apply”. Most people can’t stay isolated and still do their jobs. If their jobs are important enough, the ones that really count, they have to expose themselves to the disease. For instance, it’s the people at the grocery stores who are now one of the many front-line workers who keep civilization running. Pundits: stay in your silo. It’s all you know.
• We still don’t know how the coronavirus is killing us. This is a disease shape-shifting before our eyes. The most bedeviling confusion has arisen around the relationship of the disease to breathing, lung function, and oxygenation levels in the blood — typically, for a respiratory illness, a quite predictable relationship. It’s not unheard of, of course, for a disease to express itself in complicated or hard-to-parse ways, attacking or undermining the functioning of a variety of organs. And it’s common, as researchers and doctors scramble to map the shape of a new disease, for their understanding to evolve quite quickly. But the degree to which doctors and scientists are still feeling their way, as though blindfolded, toward a true picture of the disease cautions against any sense that things have stabilized, given that our knowledge of the disease hasn’t even stabilized. So don’t give me your “this will happen for sure” stuff. The only sure thing: this spring won’t be forgotten. When later shocks strike global civilization, we’ll remember how we behaved this time, and how it worked/didn’t work. It’s not that the coronavirus is a dress rehearsal – it’s too deadly for that. But it is the first of many calamities that will likely unfold throughout this century. Now, when they come, we’ll be familiar with how they feel. I will address this in more detail when I publish a post about the search for a vaccine but to understand what we do not know start here.
• In many ways, we’ve finally been forced into a “Big Think”. Let’s thank the dolphins. We’ve been lagging behind the times in which we live. The “Anthropocene”, the “Great Acceleration”, the “Age of Climate Change” – whatever in hell you want to call it … has shown how out of synch with the biosphere we’ve been, wasting our children’s hopes for a normal life, burning our ecological capital as if it were disposable income, wrecking our one and only home in ways that soon will be beyond our descendants’ ability to repair. Fix it? Repair it? Eh, I’m a cynic. But at least we all seem to be thinking about it. We grasp the complexity of our civilization. We feel the reality, which is that the whole system is a technical improvisation that science and technology keeps from crashing down.
• But to continue that cynical vein, over the last few weeks, in the U.S. at least, the drive is “back to work”. The politicians say we have managed to stabilize the spread of the coronavirus sufficiently enough (though today’s news screams “NOT SO!”) to begin debating when and in what ways to “reopen,” and to “normalize”, against all moral logic, the horrifying and ongoing death toll – thousands of Americans dying each day, in multiples of 9/11 every week. The key: the national government is eager to show the death rate is no longer accelerating, but holding steady, which is apparently the point at which an onrushing terror can begin to fade into mere background noise.
• Ah the U.S. It went into the coronavirus crisis with immense advantages: precious weeks of warning about what was coming, the world’s best concentration of medical and scientific expertise, effectively limitless financial resources, a military complex with stunning logistical capacity and most of the world’s leading technology corporations. Yet it managed to make itself the global epicentre of the pandemic. It is one thing to be powerless in the face of a natural disaster, quite another to watch vast power being squandered in real time – wilfully, malevolently, vindictively.
• Margaret Thatcher said that “there is no such thing as society,” and Ronald Reagan said that “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” These stupid slogans marked the turn away from the postwar period of reconstruction and underpin much of the bullshit of the past forty years. Their neoliberal structure totters. Yeah, I get it. I took Economics 101″, too. Economics is a system for optimizing resources, and, if it were trying to calculate ways to optimize a sustainable civilization in balance with the biosphere, it could be a helpful tool. But when it’s used simply to optimize profit ….
• Over the weekend Kim Robinson, the science fiction writer, posted a long essay. He noted that people who study climate change talk about “the tragedy of the horizon.” The tragedy is that we don’t care enough about those future people, our descendants, who will have to fix, or just survive on, the planet we’re now wrecking. We like to think that they’ll be richer and smarter than we are and so able to handle their own problems in their own time. He writes:
But we’re creating problems that they’ll be unable to solve. You can’t fix extinctions, or ocean acidification, or melted permafrost, no matter how rich or smart you are. The fact that these problems will occur in the future lets us take a magical view of them. We go on exacerbating them, thinking—not that we think this, but the notion seems to underlie our thinking—that we will be dead before it gets too serious. The tragedy of the horizon is often something we encounter, without knowing it, when we buy and sell. The market is wrong; the prices are too low. Our way of life has environmental costs that aren’t included in what we pay, and those costs will be borne by our descendents. We are operating a multigenerational Ponzi scheme.
• In my wild Imaginings I see geologists from a future civilization examining the layers of rock that are in the slow process of forming today. In the same way we examine the rock strata that formed as the dinosaurs died off. That civilization will see evidence of our sudden (in geological terms) impact on the planet – including fossilised plastics and layers both of carbon, from burning carbon fuels, and of radioactive particles, from nuclear testing and explosions – just as clearly as we see evidence of the dinosaurs’ rapid demise. We can already observe our layers forming today.
Most of these reflections come from my mega-piece in progress, Ruminations aboard the shipwreck “Civilization”. It’ll be an e-book. And it’s taking an inordinate amount of time not only because of the volume of material to be consumed and footnoted and linked, but because the graphics team needs to get the illustrations perfect, and my translation team is working alongside me rather than after my work is finished – working with me as I draft and redraft so that the English-French-German-Greek-Italian versions of the piece all have as much symmetry as we can muster.
I’ll end with “The Great Realisation” by British artist and poet “Probably Tomfoolery”. He is a brilliant visual storyteller, utilizing all the tools we have at hand – cameras, creativity and poetry – to create masterpieces. Enjoy: