Black Sea (48 page)

It was in the early
1980s
that Soviet marine biologists trawled up a creature unknown to them. It was an unimpressive little being, a bell-shaped thing of transparent jelly found swimming in the shallow waters of the north-western shelf. The scientists recognised that this was a species of ctenophore, an organism not unlike a jellyfish, and within a few months they identified it as
Mnemiopsis leidyi,
a native of the shallow estuaries on the Eastern Seaboard of the United States. Pretty clearly, it had been brought to the Black Sea in the water-ballast of freighters.

As Black Sea people know only too well, a weakened polity attracts invaders who can settle without meeting resistance. They find a niche, and flourish. Much the same applies to ecologies.
Mnemiopsis
was not the first alien settler in waters whose natural defences — the biological diversity of other species — were in steep decline. The big marine snail
Rapana,
probably brought from its home in the seas off Japan in the same way, had already decimated the Sea's oyster stocks before itself becoming the target of a profitable fishery. But nobody was prepared for the consequences of
Mnemiopsis.

In the late
1980s,
mostly between
1987
and
1988,
there took place one of the most devastating biological explosions ever recorded by science.
Mnemiopsis,
an animal with no known predators to control it, spread suddenly and incontinently through the Black Sea. It fed voraciously on zooplankton, the food of young fish, and on fish larvae. In the Sea of Azov,
Mnemiopsis
consumed almost the entire zooplankton population, which in
1989
and
1991
collapsed to one-six-hundredth of its normal average. Its total biomass in the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov reached
700
million tons of translucent jelly, and its impact was entirely catastrophic. No recorded destruction by human pestilence or locust swarm compares with this damage to fish and their resources, and that was only the most obvious part of the disaster. Zooplankton feed upon phytoplankton which, liberated from their normal predators, multiply uncontrollably into the vast 'blooms' which consume dissolved oxygen and destroy life in shallow waters.

The
Mnemiopsis
disaster, more than anything else, finally convinced the governments of the Black Sea states that they must take action. A series of international conferences, guided by United Nations agencies, is now trying to draw up detailed rescue programmes to cut back pollution discharges and face the consequences of overfishing. But
Mnemiopsis
itself, with no known natural enemies, is also immune to governments. Nobody knows what to do about it. One radical school of thought holds that the breakdown of the old Black Sea ecosystem has to be accepted as irreversible, and that the only hope now is to introduce other alien species selected to prey on these invaders - fish, jellyfish, ctenophores and molluscs — and eventually construct a new but stable ecological balance. Other scientists regard this as reckless, and prefer to concentrate on slow but predictable measures like the reduction of nutrients coming down-river.

Meanwhile, unexpectedly, a change has come over the
Mnemiopsis
hordes. Like some of the nomad invaders of the Pontic Steppe who ran out of grass for their horses and set off for fresh pastures,
Mnemiopsis
appears to have eaten the Black Sea bare. The total biomass is thought to be falling. In some areas, the creature is descending to greater depths, closer to the oxycline, and attacking the tiny organisms which until now have survived as the main food of Black Sea sprats. More ominously, outlying raiding parties have begun to turn up in the Sea of Marmara and even off the Aegean coast of Turkey.
Mnemiopsis
is heading west. The spectre arises of an annihilating plague breaking out in vulnerable parts of the Mediterranean: the Nile delta, the Tunisian coast, even the Gulf of Lyon off Marseille.

Appalling difficulties confront any programme for saving the marine life of the Black Sea. One of them - the most pathetic - is the bankruptcy of science in the countries of the former Soviet Union. All round the coasts of Ukraine and southern Russia, from Odessa and Sevastopol to Kerch, there once stood a chain of magnificent institutes of marine biology and oceanography. Their standards of research, not only in the Black Sea but in the oceans, were as high as any in the world, and their equipment - above all their fleet of specially fitted ships — was the envy of their Western colleagues. As far as knowledge of the Black Sea went, no other country could match the expertise built up through more than a century's work by Russian and then Soviet scientists.

At exactly the moment when awareness of the desperate situation in the Sea began to dawn on the world, this magnificent and indispensable resource was paralysed by financial collapse. In Russia, money for almost all public scientific bodies — for scientific salaries as well as for research — dried up to a mere trickle at the end of
1991.
In Ukraine, the research institutes funded by the old Soviet Academy of Sciences in Moscow were transferred to the Ukrainian government, which had no budget to carry their programmes forward.

In Odessa, I visited the Scientific Centre for Marine Ecology, which used to specialise in research on the open oceans. Its concrete tower near Langeron Point had become a place of ill-concealed despair. The centre's six ocean-going ships and the two smaller vessels for Black Sea exploration swung uselessly at their moorings, unable to sail for lack of fuel. Two of its laboratories had already closed. In the others, little work was going on. The assistants sat watching football on black-and-white television or making tea in kettles plugged into the adaptors of Finnish-made computers; a cat lay yawning on a cupboard which proved to contain old cardboard portraits of Brezhnev and Andropov.

In the midst of this desolation, scientists with dazzling records and qualifications were shuffling through the data of their past expeditions and experiments. They were concentrating on the last area for which there was any kind of official support: studies of the ecology of the Black Sea coastal shelf. Their devalued salaries now barely kept their families alive. Their foreign contacts which had kept them abreast of work abroad had been severed. Their careers seemed to be over, unless they had the luck to be headhunted by some laboratory in America or Western Europe.

Some showed that soldierly devotion to science, that monkish indifference to physical hardship and official abandonment, which I had met among archaeologists in Russia and Ukraine. Others appeared close to nervous breakdown. Later, I heard that the ships had been leased out for shopping voyages, hired by private 'suitcase businessmen' heading for Turkey to buy clothing, blankets and food which they could resell in street markets at home. In June
1994,
according to the
Washington Post,
27
out of the
40
ships which once formed the Black Sea research fleet of the Soviet Union were docked at Istanbul. It is not science, but at least it is income.

A second obstacle to the rescue of the Black Sea's ecology is the attitude of Turkey. Among all the causes of the Black Sea crisis, the most direct and obvious is overfishing. Species after species is being wiped out, or reduced to a few insignificant survivors, by genocidal and shortsighted greed which pays no attention to warnings about fish stocks until catch numbers and average weight have fallen below the point of no return. Most of the overfishing is done by Turks. This is a demonstrable fact, but a fact which Turkish fishermen, politicians and even scientists find almost impossible to admit. Ignorance, and the crude spoils-system of Turkish regional politics, contribute to this reluctance. But the most powerful motive is patriotic resentment. Once again, the outside world is perceived to be picking on Turkey and meddling in Turkish internal affairs.

Professor Mehmet Salih (^elikkale, a bouncy, fair-haired figure, is Turkey's most prominent expert on fish stocks. One unbearably hot afternoon in summer, I made my way up the hill above Trabzon to see him at the Black Sea Technical University. He does not deny that overfishing is in some degree to blame for the collapse of species, especially for the disappearance of the
hamsi
and bonito. But he is unwilling to make the Turkish fishing industry the main culprit. For Professor (^elikkale, pollution on the northwestern shelf where the fish breed is the real problem, and here he accuses the Western European states above all - the European Union, which Turkey so desperately longs to join - of neglecting their responsibilities to clean up the Danube. Turkey, he protests, has taken steps to limit fish catches off the Anatolian coast, but the 'international community' is unwilling to invest in a fund to compensate the fishing villages for their losses -money which a poor country like Turkey cannot afford.

The professor also claims that there are too many dolphins in the Black Sea. In the
1950s,
when Turkey began intensive dolphin fishing, there were about a million of them: common dolphins, bottle-nosed dolphins and harbour porpoises. By
1983,
when the anguish of foreign environmentalists persuaded Turkey to ban the fishery, they had been reduced by anything between two-thirds and a half. Professor Qelikkale believes that there were about half a million dolphins left by
1987,
which other scientists consider a large over-estimate (the Russians, who did a survey in the same year, put the figure at between
60,000
and
100,000).
He claims that they eat no less than a million tons offish a year and are increasing at the rate of
40,000
annually: two more figures regarded with scepticism by other marine biologists, who would divide this figure for fish consumption by about four. The Qelikkale appeal for a
20
per cent cull of dolphins, to restore the sprat and
hamsi
stocks, is not taken very seriously outside Turkey.

The Turkish fishermen are not just predators. They and their families are victims too. When I went to the fish-market at Trabzon, it was almost deserted, its slabs bare except for a few mullet, a spiny turbot (once common, now rare) and boxes of farmed rainbow trout. East of Trabzon, where the dark-green mountains come steeply down to the sea, the fishing-boats are pulled up along the shore and men sit all day in the tea-houses. They are paying the penalty for crude and short-sighted planning which has achieved exactly what it set out to prevent: the ruin of their livelihood.

As population increased along the coast, and the subdivision of peasant farms by inheritance led to growing land hunger, the Turkish government decided to make fishing more profitable. A programme of generous loans and grants - financed with the help of foreign investors, including the World Bank - made it possible for villagers to buy or build larger boats, equipped with new fishing and fish-locating technology. At first, all went well. The catch rose amazingly. Fortunes were made, especially by the fish-meal companies set up to take advantage of the new finance.

Then, in the
1980s,
the whole project began to slew off course. Fish numbers fell away, and the average size of fish declined sharply. As the
hamsi
and bonito became scarcer, so ever more expensive and sophisticated electronic gear was required to find them. The cost of an effective boat began to soar out of reach of most Black Sea fishermen, while the interest charges on loans ruined family after family. Politicians tried to keep their grip on the Black Sea vote by promising higher levels of grant, even by encouraging boat owners to fish illegally and out of season. But the disaster continued to deepen, as society in the little ports and fishing-harbours divided in a desperate struggle between the precariously rich and the chronically poor. The big-boat owners fell back on the most reckless and destructive fishing methods to meet their debts. The small-boat people, many of whom had owned larger vessels during the boom but had been driven bankrupt, saw their last chance of a living, the remnants of the fish stocks, being plundered away by crews with more powerful engines and larger nets.