LA Times, June 16, 2004
Sea Change Since Era of Steinbeck
Retracing the author's 1940 voyage to Mexico, a group of enthusiasts finds a vastly different marine environment.
By Kenneth R. Weiss, Times Staff Writer
ISLA CORONADO, Mexico — As warm salt water lapped against his legs, Chuck Baxter took delight in the creatures clinging to rocks and skittering around the tidal shallows. His sunburned hands dipped beneath the shimmering surface for a closer examination of starfish, crabs and sponges forming a palette of red, orange, yellow and brown.
Out of this bustling seascape surfaced a question: Why does the marine life look so rich here, when 64 years earlier author John Steinbeck considered this same spot so devoid of life that it appeared "burned," as if exposed to mild "radio-activity"?
That question also rolled around the rear deck of the Gus D., a shrimp trawler jury-rigged into a marine lab. Baxter, a retired Stanford University marine biology professor, and his mates from Monterey, were retracing the 1940 voyage of Steinbeck and his pal, marine biologist Edward F. Ricketts. Steinbeck made the 4,000-mile trip famous in his nonfiction book, "The Log From the Sea of Cortez."
Using the book and Ricketts' original field notes as a baseline, Baxter and his group spent two months seeing what has changed in this long finger of ocean that separates mainland Mexico from Baja California.
On tranquilo afternoons on the boat, with a balmy breeze and chocolate and cream hills drifting by, the group stumbled onto the reason the tide pools on Coronado Island impressed them as biologically rich, while Steinbeck considered them especially poor. It all depends on what you're used to.
In Steinbeck's day, the marine life on this tiny island near Loreto was meager compared with places that he and Ricketts found to be "ferocious with life," such as Cabo San Lucas. Now Cabo has been picked nearly clean by fishing and shellfish harvesting, and tainted by polluted runoff from an urbanized coast.
By contrast, tiny uninhabited Isla Coronado just north of Loreto has remained a refuge for sea life, said Baxter, 76, who spent decades lecturing at Stanford's Hopkins Marine Station in Monterey. But overall, he said, "it's not like it used to be."
The Sea of Cortes, officially known as the Gulf of California, has experienced a stunning decline of sea life in the last few decades, as have many other places.
It's rare to come across the once-plentiful goliath groupers that reached 500 pounds, the giant manta rays known to leap out of the water, the frenzied schools of yellowtail jacks chasing sardines to the shore, the circling columns of hammerhead sharks that once delighted fishermen and inspired the late oceanographer Jacques Cousteau in 1986 to proclaim the Sea of Cortes the "aquarium of the world."
Still, if you hadn't been here in Steinbeck's or Cousteau's day, the sea wouldn't seem empty, especially along undeveloped stretches where the desert meets the sea.
Motoring north of Isla Coronado, past other small islands that poke out of the aquamarine waters, the boat regularly encountered pods of dolphins, surfing on the bow wake before returning to gambol in the sea, feeding on bait fish. Pelicans glided by and then dropped like winged arrows to pluck fish from the ocean with their oversized beaks.
It wasn't until the end of the trip that Jon Christensen, who helped organize the expedition and is writing a book about it, noted what he and his colleagues didn't see: turtles, sharks, giant manta rays. Without the benefit of Steinbeck's log or Ricketts notes, he said, it wouldn't have occurred to him how empty the ocean had become.
Such is the universal human view of the natural world, said Jeremy Jackson, a professor at Scripps Institution of Oceanography who is studying overfishing. "Everybody thinks that 'natural' is the way the world was when they were a kid, and 'unnatural' is everything that happens afterward. That's why older people are more depressing than younger people."
Marine scientists also grapple with a phenomenon that Jackson and others call "shifting baseline." Sea life, unlike wildlife on land, is not readily visible, and the relatively young field of marine ecology has scant historical information about what used to exist beneath the waves. Instead of figuring out a true baseline, when the world was in a more natural state, scientists measure changes from the point when they begin their studies, even if that doesn't give a full picture.
Steinbeck's book, the first biological survey, provided a crucial early marker for studying changes in the Sea of Cortes. This spring's expedition was a rare opportunity to work from a rediscovered copy of Ricketts' 1940 field notes, as well as the book that incorporated those notes and was polished by a writer who had just completed his most famous novel, "The Grapes of Wrath."
The Sea of Cortes, of course, was far from its natural state when Steinbeck and Ricketts arrived. Most of the pearl oysters, which created an industry that the town of La Paz is founded on, already had been stripped from the sea in a massive treasure hunt. U.S. and Japanese fishing boats had begun pursuing tuna and shrimp, and sea lions for pet food, as well as sharks for their livers, to remedy iron-poor "tired blood."
During his Baja adventure, Steinbeck boarded a Japanese shrimp trawler and was appalled that the weighted nets would tear up the ocean floor, and pull in nine pounds of fish that would be shoveled overboard dead for every pound of shrimp. He saw good men "caught in a large destructive machine," which he accused of "committing a true crime against nature."
These foreign fleets were long ago booted from Mexican waters, and replaced by a fleet of Mexican shrimp trawlers and tuna boats, and thousands and thousands of small skiffs, called pangas, which multiplied with government subsidies in the 1970s and '80s. Each panga spreads gill nets — banned in many parts of the world — which indiscriminately kill anything large enough to get snagged in their webbing.
full: <http://www.latimes.com/news/local/cortez/la-me-steinbeck16jun16,1,4774103.story?coll=la-home-headlines>
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