Boat International US Edition - June 2018

THE OCEAN AWARDS 2018

Judges’ Special Award:

Campaign of the Year

Establishing the Ross Sea Marine Protected Area

Joint

Winner

The Ross Sea is the southernmost part of the Southern Ocean. It

extends into a huge bay under the Ross Ice Shelf, part of the polar

ice cap that is Antarctica. It remains one of the last, perhaps the

last, genuinely pristine place on Earth, home to a fully functioning

marine ecosystem that is still miraculously free from pollution,

untainted by mining and untroubled by invasive species.

Wildlife thrives here, but in 1996 a New Zealand fishing vessel

discovered abundant Antarctic toothfish that, renamed Chilean

sea bass, commanded about $70 a kilo. By 2010, as many as 20

long-line ships were catching about 3,000 tonnes a year,

threatening an entire ecosystem; their dwindling numbers

affected their predators: killer whales, Weddell seals, sperm

whales and giant squid. The only way the unique Ross Sea

ecosystem can survive intact was for it to be declared a Marine

Protected Area (MPA), the world’s largest, in which commercial

fishing is banned.

In December 2017, the 25 countries of the Commission for the

Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR),

an international convention founded in 1982 to protect the

southern polar seas, agreed that 72 percent of the MPA, which

covers 600,000 square miles, should be declared a no-take

zone, in which all fishing is prohibited for the next 35 years. It is,

says Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, one of the Ocean Awards 2018

judges, “a phenomenal achievement... it shows that the protection

of great swaths of our oceans is a possibility.”

Many individuals and organizations were involved in this

achievement, but the judges singled out the below individuals for

their outstanding contributions.

Scientist

GEORGE WATTERS

Chair, CCAMLR Working Group on

Ecosystem Monitoring and

Management

As the lead US scientist who worked

on the campaign to have the Ross

Sea designated an MPA, the fisheries

biologist Dr George Watters spent

six years traveling the world to

persuade all 25 member countries of

CCAMLR to come on board with

the plan. China and Russia were the

last to be convinced. His day job is

director of the Antarctic Ecosystem

Research Division of the Southwest

Fisheries Science Center in La Jolla,

California, whose mission is “to

generate the scientific information

necessary for the conservation

and management of living

marine resources.”

Visiona r y

PETER YOUNG,

JOHN WELLER AND

DAVID AINLEY

The Last Ocean filmmakers

Vital to the success of the Ross Sea

MPA campaign was the team who

made the film The Last Ocean (2012),

winner of numerous documentary

awards. Its tagline summed up

its objective: “The race to protect the

Earth’s last untouched ocean from

our insatiable appetite for fish.”

The 88-minute documentary was a

collaboration between the New

Zealand filmmaker Peter Young and

the Californian ecologist Dr David

Ainley, who had spent three decades

studying Antarctica. With the US

conservation photographer John

Weller, they also set up a charitable

trust of the same name.