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Your Planet Needs You welcomes home the Sea Shepherd Fleet
by Viv Benton
The Sea Shepherd ships have just returned to port in Australia
where two, the Steve Irwin and the Sam Simon are moored at
Sea Works in Williamstown near the city of Melbourne. On
weekends the ships are open to the public and Sea Shepherd
volunteers take tours to point out the features of the ships,
and talk about the role they have played in preventing the
killing of whales in the Southern Ocean whale sanctuary near
the frozen continent of Antarctica.
It is to the credit of the previous and present Australian
governments that asked the International Court of Justice to
rule on whether the Japanese whaling fleets activities
constituted “scientific whaling” or whether it was commercial
whaling in disguise, that the taking of whales by the Japanese
fleet has now been ruled illegal. Whales are extremely
important to the marine ecosystem as they keep the entire
system in check. The feces of whales, seeds the ocean with
iron, encouraging the growth of phytoplankton. These tiny
plants take in CO2 to grow - absorbing it from the atmosphere,
and they give back to the atmosphere oxygen, which most
animals need to breath.
Phytoplankton are fed on by the ocean’s krill who in turn are
the mainstay food for many of the ocean’s creatures, in
particular whales. The whales trawl the ocean for the krill,
which when passed through the gut of whales is excreted and
finds it’s way slowly to the ocean floor where it locks away CO2
out of the atmosphere in the depths of the ocean. When
whales are removed from the marine ecosystem, this delicate
balance is thrown into chaos and the CO2 in t H][