My feature for Australia and New Zealand magazine on eco-volunteering in the Antipodes is in stores now….

Thanks to Biosphere Expeditions, Conservation Volunteers, Reef Check Australia and everyone else who helped out!

Click here to read it as a PDF

In many ways, I think aquaculture sounds like a sensible idea.

• Natural fish stocks around the world are now dangerously low because of overfishing. By farming fish in giant tanks, we can reduce the pressure on natural stocks while ensuring man’s food supply.

• As the fish nutritionist in this story points out, farmed fish on a controlled diet are free of the mercury and other contaminants found in fish taken from the sea.

• The story also suggets fish-farmers can charge more for farmed fish as they are more standardised in size, and the fish can reach the plate much faster (catching them really is as easy as shooting fish in a barrel…).

• Researchers are also trying to make the practise sustainable, by using waste-water to feel algae, which feeds plankton, which in turn feeds the fish.

But I couldn’t help feeling uneasy about aquaculture – or at least, in the form in which it is described here.

• The description of how the fish eggs are extracted is pretty gross in itself: “Flounder specialist Troy Rezek demonstrated “strip-spawning” on an anesthetized female, harvesting her eggs by pressing them out in a fluid-looking stream.“

• The fish might be free of mercury, but you can bet they require a lot of antibiotics and other medication because they’re kept in such close proximity.

• The story also says that a local company is now “air-expressing” fillets from North Carolina to other major cities in the US. A model built on air-freighting can hardly be the way forward – we’d certainly need to investigate inland fish farms as opposed to flying it inland from the coast.

• The journalist says that, because commercial fishmeal is expensive, the research centre has been experimenting with substitute protein sources such as soybeans. Considering the massive Amazon deforestation that is already taking place to make way for soya plantations, developing yet another industry which depends upon it does not sound good.

That said, the fish do have to be fed on something, and soya would be preferable to smaller fish being taken from the ocean to feed them – a practise which Kristian Teleki of SeaWeb mentioned in his lecture in December.

I didn’t have a clue how big the global aquaculture industry is, but when I looked into it, I realised it’s huge:  WWF says almost half the seafood we eat have been artificially farmed, and that aquaculture is the fastest growing food industry in the world.

SeaWeb and WWF are extremely concerned about damaging aquaculture practises – but I see that both organisations are currently helping set up the Aquaculture Stewardship Council (ASC) – a new body expected to be in operation by 2011. Furthermore, new global standards for the farming of tilapia were released just a few weeks ago, with several other species guidelines to come, so I’m hopeful that aquaculture will develop in a responsible and sustainable way in the future.

In the afternoon, we heard about big cat conservation Tessa McGregor, who heads up Biosphere’s snow leopard project in the stunning Altai Mountains of Central Asia. We also heard from Chris Gerrard of the Wildlife Trust who set up the Great Fen Project in Cambridgeshire (see my Greentraveller.co.uk blog on that one).

But the morning concentrated on marine conservation, starting with a lecture by Kristian Teleki, one of the vice presidents at SeaWeb, and not-for-profit communications organisation which educates and engages the public on the threats facing the ocean.

Some of the facts with which he began his presentation were a horrifying recap:

• The area of the seafloor dredged each year is 150 times the area of forest cut down worldwide
• 90% of all the ocean’s big fish are gone
• Outside Europe and North America, 80% of sewage enters the coastal ocean untreated – and that includes the Caribbean

As well as the issues of over-fishing, pollution and warming of the ocean by climate change, Kristian also told us a lot about what he termed the ‘souring’ of the ocean. The increasing acidity of the ocean does not get as much coverage as the increasing temperature, and I certainly didn’t know much about it myself. The ocean absorbs carbon dioxide from the atmosphere but it forms a mild carbonic acid when it does so, making it harder for corals, shellfish, and anything else that forms calcium, to calcify. By 2100, 70% of our deep sea corals might be in acidic water. If the pH of the ocean drops to pH 7.3, half of all the mussels in the ocean will die. If it reaches pH 7, there will be 100% mortality of scallops.

But the most interesting thing I took away from Kristian’s presentation was his emphasis on needing to understand human behaviour in order to achieve anything in conservation.

One of SeaWeb’s key aims is to help get the right message out. He said the doom-and-gloom coverage that the mainstream media give to conservation issues is hugely counter-productive:

“Bad headlines make our job harder. The average person on the street thinks, why should I give my money?…Stories that the reefs will be dead by 2020, dead by 2040 – how are we possibly going to sell this to governments when they think we should be putting our money towards something else?”

Armageddon-style headlines about the future of our planet definitely make me sit up and take notice. Personally, they make me all the more determined to try to do my bit. But I can see how for others it could cement a notion that there’s no point trying.

I don’t think that Kristian means the media should be telling only ‘good news stories’ about conservation. Rather, we should be framing all the bad news with more positive messages about what has been and can be achieved when everyone works together.

The massive expansion of tourism over the last 40 years has led to the rapid decline in the quality of the reef.

Coral everywhere faces the threat of bleaching because water is getting warmer because of climate change. But in highly-developed Cancun, pollution by sewage and chemicals and overfishing mean the coral in this region is dying faster than anywhere else.

The Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network says the amount of reef surface covered by live coral in the Caribbean has fallen about 80% in the past 30 years. In the Pacific, between Hawaii and Indonesia, meanwhile, reefs have been losing about 1% of their coral coverage annually over the past 25 years. eTurboNews spoke to Cancun dive instructors who said they were worried they might not have a job for much longer.

Cancun knew it needed to address the problem, but the country desperately needs its tourist dollars, and Cancun couldn’t turn divers and snorkellers away.

By building the underwater museum – which in effect becomes an artificial reef – there is something new for divers and snorkellers to explore, and the existing coral reef is given chance to recover from years of damage. I doubt it’ll ever get back to its original condition but coral will colonise the inert concrete of the sculptures, creating new coral coverage.

I must admit, the thought of an ‘underwater museum’ didn’t really float my boat at first – I dive to see wildlife, not for cultural enrichment.

But when I checked out the website of Jason de Caires Taylor, the British artist behind the project, I really warmed to the  idea.

‘Museum’ is a bit misleading – it will be more of a sculpture garden, with more than 300 life-size sculptures, such as an army of Mayan warriors, and a ‘dream catcher’ where visitors can leave a message in a bottle. I recognised the photos of his existing project – Taylor built the Underwater Gallery at Moliniere Bay in Grenada.

His description of what it’s like to experience artwork underwater sounds fantastic:

“Underwater and devoid of white walls the viewer is unrestrained in their interaction with the work. Buoyancy and weightlessness enable a detached physical experience, encouraging encounters that are perceptual and personal. As time passes and the works change, they reshape and redefine the underwater landscape in unpredictable ways.”

And the sculptures that have been submerged for some time, now covered in coral polyps and other growth, are really stunning.

Sinking a load of concrete statues is not going to solve the massive and complex threats that coral reefs around the world face but the Underwater Museum does seem like an exciting and innovative step in the right direction.

Discarded plastic bags were causing the deaths of birds, turtles, dolphins and other marine creatures which swallowed or became entangled in the rubbish blown out to sea. I’ve dived the Red Sea a couple of times and been disappointed to see litter – it really makes your heart sink.

But the governor of the Red Sea brought in legislation in January, and the campaign seems to be doing extremely well.

HEPCA (Hurghada Environmental Protection and Conservation Association) has now given out 50,000 cloth bags free-of-charge; most local restaurants and shops have started giving out paper bags instead, and people are re-using their plastic ones.

In a perfect example of how going green usually has even wider benefits, the making of these fabric bags has generated much-needed employment for local women.

It’s a lovely ‘good-news’ story, but what a contrast to the photo-story on The Guardian site yesterday that highlighted the monstrous swathes of plastic floating around in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

A mass of plastic bottles, caps and beer can loops the size of Texas is hidden beneath the surface of the water, breaking down into tiny parts that get into the food chain at the lowest level.

The effect on bird life is also catastrophic. Albatrosses pick up the litter and feed it to their young, thinking it’s food. On the nearby coral atoll known as Midway are the corpses of thousands of albatross chicks which have died from starvation, toxicity, and choking.

The photographer, Chris Jordan, did not interfere with the corpses in any way – the photos show the exact contents of the chick’s stomach when it died what must have been its very painful death. There are more photos in all their technicolour glory on his website.

You don’t see so much about ‘Keeping Britain Tidy’ any more. It’s perhaps a less pressing concern in the face of irreversible climate change, but these photos have been a chilling reminder to me of why litter is still very much something we should be worrying about.

[Click to see video]

I know that shows he’s bored and I don’t agree with him being in there, but if the hermit juggling footage was on YouTube,  I’d probably watch it.

It really is gigantic – 77 different tanks, and the main one measures 8 by 20 metres, containing nearly two million gallons of water. The star attraction is four massive whale sharks, up to 8 metres long.

The sharks were beautiful (and seemed happy enough), but it didn’t seem right for the biggest fish in the sea to be cooped up in a giant fish tank.

I actually found the manatees and turtles more distressing though – the two manatees looked completely miserable.

I’ve been reading some interesting/disturbing pieces about aquaria on the Captive Animals Protection Society website – it’s calling for an end to any whales or dolphins being kept in captivity. I can’t see Japan taking this onboard any time soon – animal welfare doesn’t seem high on their agenda . In Naha, I saw a man with performing cat – he’d tied it to a stool and made it dance for money.

I’m not sure that aquariums in the UK or anywhere else are any better though. A report by CAPS in 2004 suggested that the animals in 75% of UK aquaria had health problems, and that touching pools seriously harm the creatures involved.

Hmm. Will aim to steer clear of aquariums and stick to scuba diving instead in future methinks.

[The biggest aquarium in the world is in Georgia in the States by the way. They have whale sharks AND beluga whales there. Next stop - blue whales?]