DIVE LOG AUSTRALASIA FEB 2025 ISSUE 410

Dive Log always celebrates the miracle of life and the beauty in the oceans. The greatest experience in life is adventure, discovery and communication with Mother Nature. Plonk on a face mask, dip into the water and observe as the adventure begins. The oceans have so much living abundance. Every single lifeform you focus on can illustrate this point. Take Garden Eels. I saw patches in Fiji. over my many hundreds of dives. I am a numbers man so I do a rough population count. One garden Eel. Two Garden Eels… just like Count von Count from Sesame Street. Continuing on, I estimate the population in one square metre in one patch; then the total area and finally approximate the numbers of patches… then do the sums. Warning here, we are in the challenge of elementary arithmetic. I come up with hundreds of millions of Garden eels around the rich waters of Fiji. Next, I observe these beautiful little critters reaching up into the current to gobble down plankton; shrimps, larvae, eggs and more. I guess they will eat hundreds of them each day. The total food source is now numbered in the many billions. Each year, trillions get eaten. Next level includes the entire food web including all fish and sea life. We are talking Googles of life forms. Ten to the power of a hundred. (one with a hundred zeros) You get the picture. The Mother Nature is mind blowing. The super abundance is there. It is spectacularly mind blowing and you have used some basic garden logic to see the incredulity of the Ocean. It is a place of real magic. A place to be revered, admired and celebrated; a place to be preserved. That is why I like to say. The greatest experience on earth is discovery and then to polish it with thought. Our ocean is a brilliant place to encounter the greatest adventures of all. Everywhere you go it is jam packed with life. I met a Marine Biologist who studied viruses and tiny organisms in water. He said millions of viruses and life molecules live in every drop. This why I always tell my Marine Biology students that none of us has seen more than 1% of marine life that is under our noses, even after forty-eight years of active diving, in my case. You could go on. Tiger shark eat thousands of fish to get to four metres. Whales have eaten countless numbers and so on. This brings us to the concept of NET ZERO. The greatest tragedy in the ocean is illustrated by this anecdote. Fishermen from Botany Bay used to net the beach at Kurnell in the 1960’s and haul in tonnes of fish. Salmon Haul Bay at Cronulla was renowned for netting tonnes of salmon. Lilli Pilli had massive schools of Luderick and Grey Nurse Sharks. Nowadays, all gone! Fifty years ago, Tuna Fishermen scooped up eighty tonnes of Tuna in one net down off the Sth coast of NSW. OUR COVER PHOTO OUR FRONT COVER photo by Mike Scotland is a friendly female Leopard shark taken at Wooli, Nth Solitary Island. Leapard sharks migrate south from the Great Barrier Reef in summer.

A year or two later, the Net haul was less than one tonne. Tuna fishing has become uneconomic and unviable. They never returned a few fish to be the breeding stock for the future. Therefore, net zero! Today, the seas around Sydney are empty. It is a place of desolation where fish life sits at about two per cent of its capacity. This is an absolute shame! The tragedy is that most people dive in and think that it is ‘normal’. The empty sea is a direct result of overfishing and pollution. Divers see examples of the wrong type of human activity all too often. A discarded two-metre wide Smooth sting ray carcass with its wings chopped off. Blue gropers and Red Morwong with non-fatal wounds from spear guns. High Nitrogen pollution from septic systems. The hullaballoo about Net Zero in parliament ignores my reality of diving in Sydney. The zero fish life in the nets. The empty ecosystems out of balance and devoid of life. An Australian Scientist calculated that the photosynthetic activity of Australia absorbs between five and ten times all of the Carbon resulting from all human activity. Australia is already Carbon positive, ten times over! Net Zero for marine life is a far more important issue in my mind. Empty nets, barren seas, desolate oceans, overfishing, pollution and all other forms of man-made disasters mean that every ecosystem in the ocean is so far out of balance that it is a crime. Humankind has been mindlessly operating on an unlimited ‘take, take, take’ policy and giving almost nothing back. Overfishing is nothing short of marine vandalism. The ocean will provide enough food for the planet if managed properly. So few of us are aware of this issue. So the question arises. What can we do about it? Education is the answer. Tell the world! Tell a hundred people. Let the public know that we can and will save the Great Barrier Reef. All we have to do is to monetize it. Each acre has a dollar value either as a fish breeding area, a tourist attraction or research area. The sea is treated as worthless in terms of real estate, place to be exploited and dump rubbish. The reality is that humans desperately want to commune with wild life and see amazing things. We are hard wired to Nature! I predict a significant rise in the popularity of nature based recreation in the future. As more people are forced by economics to live in units, they will crave contact with nature. The oceans and mountains will become even more popular as people need to see the fish corals and forests up close and personal. I hope that the scuba diving industry in Australia will grow back to the halcyon days of the eighties once again. That is part of the mission of Dive Log Australasia. This issue has many inspiring articles on Sea Slugs, great dives, swimming with sharks and much more. Read on, share with other divers and enjoy.

Mike

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DIVE LOG Australasia #410 - December ‘25

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