Coordinator of the Welcoming the Whales Festival, Lloyd Edwards says nurturing the ocean and conserving sea life for future generations includes using better fishing methods such as acoustic releases which doesn’t entangle sea animals.
He said this during one of 30 Welcoming The Whales talks across the continent – this one hosted by the River & Ski Boat Club on Saturday, June 11. The Whales Festival started this month in Gqeberha with more than 1000 attendees and it runs until August 2022 at different locations in Southern Africa between Gabon and Kenya. The festival celebrations follow after Algoa Bay in 2021 became the world’s fifth Whale Heritage Site and the second in South Africa, following The Bluff, Durban.
Edwards is part of the Raggy Charters team which does marine eco cruises in Algoa Bay, where they raise money to fund marine conservation project, bay watch, which has been running for the past three decades.
“When tourists come to your boat to do a cruise, they don’t want to just do a cruise,” Edwards said. “They want to know what you are doing that’s sustainable.”
Talking on the migration of humpback whales, Edwards said humpback whales are the only whales that can fight off a killer whale attack. He also spoke about the development of a culture for sperm whales that was passed on to future generations. He said this tactic was only documented in journals as recently as two years ago.
“When sperm whales were getting hunted by the sailing ships, they would swim directly into the wind and the sailing ship had to tack to follow them and they couldn’t keep up with them,” he said. Some of those whales, he said, went on to teach sperm whales in another ocean, which was about 10 000km away, to swim into the wind to get away from the sailors.
Edwards said the the whales campaign which caused the paradigm shift between 2010 and 2015 to stop the killing of whales had brought up the numbers of whales back to pre-exploitation numbers. In line with this success story, Edwards is calling on the public to sign a petition calling for the government to ban the use of ropes in the fishing industry which entangle sea animals and disorientates them and end up killing them.
Edwards encouraged the audience to sign the petition of rope-less fishing of the crayfish industry that can be found on the Raggy Charters website under the Baywatch Conservation Projects.
“The fishing industry don’t want to spend money on acoustic releases, but the ministers have got the power to actually tell them that they have to do it,” he said.
The website reads, “We now need to roll-out this process to the rock lobster fisheries. We call on Minister Barbara Creecy to implement rope-less technology in this fishery and protect our marine life for us and our future generation. No more Ropes!”
It continues: “The benefits of rope-less fishing will have a profound impact on reducing and eliminating entanglement, not only of whales, but also dolphins, sharks, sea turtles, seals and other marine wildlife… Not only will whales and marine life benefit, but fishermen too… All this is a workable solution to stop entanglement of our marine life, specifically whales.”
