419 Dive Log Australasia AUGUST 2026

Let me introduce you to the most numerous aquatic bird on the planet. A “seabird” that never goes to sea. It can’t swim or dive. It can’t even fly. Yet there is no species of aquatic avian in the world more numerous or ecologically impactful to the ocean than the chicken. There are some five hundred different breeds of chicken, from the Portuguese Amarela to the Chinese Wengwang. Just like every dog breed began with the wolf, all five hundred chicken breeds began with the Red Junglefowl, a native of Southeast Asia and except for the Red Junglefowl every other species of chicken is an unnatural genetically modified human creation. Chickens, like dogs, began being domesticated beginning some 9,000 years ago. The current estimated global population of domestic chickens is around 28 billion birds at any one time. The estimated total population of the world’s 365 different species of seabirds does not exceed 1.5 billion. The approximately 500 species of domestic chicken vastly outnumber all 365 species of seabirds. The commercial chicken egg industry produces some 1.2 trillion eggs annually. Every year some seven billion male chicks are horrifically slaughtered in meat grinders right after birth and rendered into chicken and pig meal which means that aquatic chickens are also cannibals, a recipe for mad chicken disease. The Aquatic Chicken W hen you think of seabirds, you think of albatrosses, penguins, seagulls and cormorants. They all eat fish but there is one bird that eats more fish than all of them, more fish than all species of seabirds in the sea. It is the bird that a very large number of humans eat every single day. by Captain Paul Watson

Eating the brains of ground up cows is what caused mad cow disease. This has not yet been verified for chickens, but it is a very macabre practice mostly out of sight and out of mind. The number of slaughtered newborn chickens exceeds the total number of the world population of seabirds. What makes the chicken an aquatic consumer is the fact that tens of millions of tons of fish, or about 40% of the annual global fish catch, is processed into fish meal (protein pellets) to be fed to domestic salmon, pigs and chickens, which makes chickens and pigs major consumers of fish. Six million tons of fish are rendered into fish meal annually. It requires four to five tons of fish to produce one ton of fish meal. Of the six million tons of fish meal produced each year, some 56% is fed to farm-raised fish, 20% is fed to pigs, and 12% is fed to chickens. The rest is used for fertilizers. Chickens are consuming some 4,787,000 tons of fish meal annually, which represents about 39 million tons of wild-caught fish. Because of the global decline in wild fish populations, the farm-raised salmon industry is replacing fish with krill from the Southern Ocean, taking food from the whales, penguins, seals, and seabirds to fuel the human demand for cheap salmon. Last year, the krill fishery took 650,000 metric tons of krill from the Southern Ocean, and they

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DIVE LOG Australasia #419 August ’ 26

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