Pete Thomas Outdoors

Video shows fisherman toss explosive at sea lions; investigation launched

By Pete Thomas

Video circulating on social media shows a British Columbia commercial fisherman tossing an explosive device among dozens of sea lions resting on the surface, scattering the mammals.

The graphic footage has angered animal rights proponents and prompted an investigation by Canadian authorities, while it appears to have been published to show the extent of a sea lion “invasion” that some say threatens the livelihoods of fishermen.

Campbell River Whale & Bear excursions posted the video to Facebook Wednesday with the statement: “This video was shot over the weekend on a commercial seine vessel waiting for the Commercial Herring opening. I’m making this video public so the public is aware that this is happening repeatedly right now off Comox, Denman Island and Hornby Island.

We think this video was filmed by the BC Balance Pinniped Society who is trying to push a 50% Pinniped cull on the coast of British Columbia and Canada. This behavior is 100% illegal and goes against the Marine Mammal Guidelines.”

The Pacific Balance Pinniped Society first posted the footage Tuesday on its Facebook group page. The group stated that the “bear banger” device was used to scatter Stellar and California sea lions that were sitting over a massive school of herring.

The society wants Canada’s Department of Fisheries and Oceans to expand indigenous harvesting rights to include the commercial sale of the seal and sea lion meat. The group believes a substantial cull would allow various fisheries to rebound, and create safer and more productive fishing conditions.

The society’s Facebook post, written by Thomas Sewid, begins by describing the scene before the explosive device was tossed: “This is what the herring test boats are dealing with at night right now. Theoretically darkness brings the herring to the surface, which makes it easier to catch them. The test boats are to toss rings with nets and drag up about fifty pounds of herring to sample for roe percentage content from the nets.

“Seeing as there’s such a high number of British Columbia resident Stellar sea lions and thousands of invasive California sea lions, the herring are being dove upon. This massive amount of sea lions diving on huge schools of herring scares them to stay deep. This makes it so captains cannot catch herring, for they’re too deep for nets.”

CBC identified the fisherman who tossed the device as Allan Marsden, and reported that the Department of Fisheries and Oceans is investigating and might file charges.

The DFO stated in a tweet: “Reminder: It is illegal to disturb #seals, #sealions or other marine mammals. This includes the use of acoustic deterrents such as seal bombs or other explosives.”

Andrew Trites, who runs the marine mammal research department at the University of British Columbia, said of the video footage: “Throwing a stick of dynamite next to the head of an animal, you’re going to blow out its hearing. If it’s near its eye, you’re going to blow the eye out.

Trites added: “I know I’ve heard them say ‘Well it doesn’t hurt the animal.’ Well if that’s the case I would challenge them to hold that stick in their hand, light it and let’s film it.”

–Image showing Stellar sea lions is courtesy of NOAA Fisheries

 

Popular Yellowstone wolf killed by Montana hunter

By Pete Thomas

A gray wolf popular among visitors to Yellowstone National Park has been killed by a hunter outside the park.

The dark-colored female of the Lamar Canyon Pack, cataloged as 926F and affectionately known as ‘Spitfire,’ was shot last Saturday outside Cooke City, Montana.

Abby Nelson, a wolf management specialist with Montana, Fish, Wildlife and Parks, told the Jackson Hole News and Guide that the animal was legally harvested during the fall hunting season

Nelson added, “The circumstances are obviously a little bit harder for people to stomach, because that pack had showed signs of habituation.”

News of 926F’s death has saddened fans of Yellowstone in part because members of the Lamar Canyon Pack are somewhat accustomed to the presence of humans, and are often viewed from park roads.

Rachel Tilseth, in a post on the Love Wolves Facebook page, used a photo by Vanessa Vought and stated: “Sad news coming out of Yellowstone National Park: 926F was shot in Montana’s wolf trophy hunt… 926F of the Lamar Canyon Pack was the daughter of the famous O-Six wolf that was also killed by a trophy hunter as she left the safety of YNP boundary. Thanks to the heartless trophy hunter 926F joins her mother in the spirit world cut down far too soon.”

Wildlife photographer Deby Dixon posted a Facebook tribute to 926F, stating that “her eyes were always bright and she was always ready to go; nothing stopped her.”

The Wolf Conservation Center criticized the state for allowing sport hunting for Yellowstone-area wolves, citing a recent study showing that the apex predators help generate millions annually in regional tourism revenue.

Montana allows wolf hunting as a means of managing the state’s overall wolf population, which it considers to be stable. Licenses cost $19 for residents and $50 for non-residents. Hunting is not allowed inside national park boundaries.

The most recent estimate lists the population at “a minimum of 536 wolves in 126 packs.”

–Top image courtesy of ©Deby Dixon

 

Girl, 11, raises $10,000 to save elephants, and it all began with a lemonade stand

Téa Megill mans her booth at the Honolulu Zoo

By Pete Thomas

When Téa Megill learned during a trip to the Honolulu Zoo last summer that elephants may be headed toward extinction, the 10-year-old wanted to help.

She opened a neighborhood lemonade stand to raise money for the fight against poaching in Africa, in what at first seemed merely an admirable gesture.

But it has become much more than a gesture. The Honolulu sixth-grader has since been allowed to move her stand inside the zoo, where she also sells homemade bracelets and other items to conservation-minded visitors.

So far Téa has raised nearly $10,000, with all proceeds going to the Elephant Crisis Fund.

“We’re very proud of her,” Sejal Megill, Téa’s mother, told BNQT Outdoors. “We thought this going to be a summer project, but her drive and motivation have carried it so much farther. She would fundraise every day if she could.”

Téa has a website, Elephant.Ade, that operates under the slogan, “Aloha for the Elephants.” She runs the stand at the zoo’s Elephant Habitat each Wednesday afternoon. Products on the website are sold around the world.

"My goal is $1 million for the elephants and that they could be saved," Téa told Hawaii’s KHON 2.

Africa’s elephants, to be sure, need help.

The Elephant Crisis Fund, part of the the Wildlife Conservation Network, states on its website that wild elephants could be wiped out within a generation.

More than 30,000 elephants are killed annually for their ivory tusks, which support a lucrative black-market industry. Meanwhile, an exhaustive effort involving multiple partners is combating poaching and trafficking.

Téa, a budding conservationist, can boast that she’s part of this effort.

At the zoo, she told KHON 2, she helps to raise awareness.

“I'll start walking down that path or this path and I'll start giving them brochures and talking to them about what's going on with the elephants,” she said. “And then if they decide to come up, then we just explain what we're selling and stuff.”

Téa recently told The Eden Edition that someday she’d like to visit Africa and see the wild elephants.

Wrote Shelby Eden, “With the determination of a young Jane Goodall, I have a feeling all of Téa’s dreams will undoubtedly come true.”

–Images are courtesy of Téa Megill

Poachers captured on video shooting down spy aircraft in Mexico's vaquita protection zone

Video screen grab shows man said to have been shooting at drone

By Pete Thomas

Sea Shepherd has released footage showing one of its spy drones being shot down Sunday night by poachers in Mexico’s Sea of Cortez.

The conservation group is in the northern Sea of Cortez, or Gulf of California, trying to locate and remove gill-nets that indiscriminately catch critically endangered vaquita porpoises.

Late Sunday night, the MV John Paul DeJoria crew used radar and a night-vision drone to locate three skiffs working inside a vast no-fishing zone.

Poachers use gill-nets to target totoaba, a type of croaker whose swim bladders fetch thousands of dollars on black markets in China and Hong Kong, where the bladders are believed by some to possess special medicinal powers.

The nets sometimes trap and drown vaquitas, which might number fewer than 20 animals and are on the brink of extinction.  (Vaquitas are endemic to the northern Sea of Cortez.)

Vaquita image courtesy of ©Tom Jefferson/NOAA

In the footage, viewers can see four men on one of the skiffs, which appears illuminated because of night-vision technology.  The man in the rear can be seen aiming and shooting at the drone, which is eventually destroyed.

“Poachers often conceal themselves in the cover of night, which is what we suspected to be the case here,” Capt. Benoit Sandjian said in a news release. 

The drone had been shot at by the crew of a different skiff before it was shot down as it hovered about 100 feet above the four men and their net.  The Sea Shepherd crew was 1.4 miles away, aboard the John Paul DeJorian, when it realized it had lost the unmanned aircraft.

Sea Shepherd said this was the first time poachers had used firearms to try to disable spy drones.

Mexico has tried several measures to save the vaquita, and to prevent poaching. But with totoaba bladders in such high-priced demand, illegal fishing within the exclusion zone – often spearheaded by powerful drug cartels – remains problematic.

Sea Shepherd is patrolling the exclusion zone in cooperation with the Mexican Navy, in what Sea Shepherd calls Operation Milagro. 

Guide involved in Cecil the Lion hunt charged with poaching rare antelope

Cecil the Lion

By Pete Thomas

A guide who was involved in the controversial Cecil the Lion trophy hunt last year has been arrested in Zimbabwe and charged with illegally killing a roan antelope.

Headman Sibanda, 56, was arrested Thursday after authorities received a tip about his alleged involvement in poaching an endangered roan antelope.

According to Times Live, killing a roan antelope in Zimbabwe carries a maximum sentence of nine years in prison. Sibanda was jailed, but planned to apply for bail.

Roan antelope

The roan antelope is found mostly in savannas in West and Central Africa. It has become regionally extinct in two African countries, according to the African Wildlife Foundation, which cites poaching and loss of habitat is key threats to the species.

Cecil the Lion, a favorite among tourists in Hwange National Park, was killed outside the park by an American dentist in July 2015, sparking international outrage.

The hunting party was said to have lured Cecil beyond park boundaries with an animal carcass tied to the bumper of a truck.

The 13-yea-old lion, who was GPS collared and part of a research project, was shot with a crossbow and stalked for 40 hours before being finished off with a rifle.

According to Times Live, Sibanda sold the permit used by a Zimbabwe safari company to host Palmer's trophy hunt.

After a long investigation, authorities announced that they would not charge the hunter, Walter Palmer of Minnesota, because he had acquired proper paperwork and the legal authority to hunt on private land.

Because of the fierce controversy in the weeks following the hunt, Palmer was forced into hiding because of threats and protests.

Stunned diver escapes great white shark's fury, after shark lunges into his cage

 

By Pete Thomas

A diver hoping to photograph great white sharks from the safety of a metal cage instead found himself hunkering down while a crazed shark – which had somehow broke through the bars to join the man – tried desperately to escape.

"Oh God... I almost had a heart attack," the diver says in the accompanying video, in the aftermath of his harrowing encounter.

It was the second time in less than a month that a great white shark had entered an occupied cage at Mexico’s Guadalupe Island.

During the latest incident, the shark was following a chunk of tuna being pulled alongside the cage by a crewman aboard Solmar V. The shark lunged, crashed through the bars, and 30 seconds of chaos ensued before the shark leaped out of the cage through its open top.

When the diver climbed out of the cage and onto the boat, there was a tangible sigh of relief.

Great white shark bleeds while finally escaping through the top of the cage.

The video was uploaded Monday by YouTube user Gabe and Garret. Their father, who also has not responded to an inquiry, wrote on Facebook:   

“Great white sharks are awesome and what appears to be an 'attack' on a diving cage is not. They are temporarily blinded when they open their mouths, so when the shark went for the tuna bait on the rope it accidentally slammed into the cage.

“They can't swim backwards so it thrust forward through the cage with a diver inside. Rest assured, no one was injured and after a dramatic half minute, the diver emerged safely.”

How did this happen?

Crewmen sometimes pull roped chunks of tuna alongside cages, allowing photographers shooting through a wide gap to capture memorable images.

In this case, it appears, the crewman let the tuna dangle for too long next to the cage. The shark lunged after the bait and somehow jammed itself into the cage.

These types of incidents are exceedingly rare, but last month at Guadalupe Island, a great white shark swam vertically into an open-topped cage with four divers inside.

That shark, also, was able to get way without anybody – excluding, perhaps, the shark – being injured.

Guadalupe Island, a remote volcanic land mass 160 miles west of Baja California, is seasonal home to dozens of great white sharks. Prime viewing months are August through October.

Grizzly bear mauls hunter in Alaska; hunter's partner shoots and kills bear

A hunter in Alaska was attacked by a grizzly bear on Saturday, but spared serious injury when his partner shot and killed the bear.

The incident occurred on Chichagof Island near Neka Bay. Josh Dybdahl, 30, was hunting deer with Anthony Lindoff, 36, when the bear charged from the brush and pinned Dybdahl to the ground.

According to KTUU, the grizzly with her two cubs. The men heard a “whoof” before the bear charged, presumably after being startled.

After pinning Dybdahl, the bear head-butted the man, while Lindoff retrieved a rifle from his pack and shot the bear.

The men contacted the Coast Guard and Dybdahl was eventually treated at Bartlett Regional Hospital for non-life-threatening injuries.

It remains unclear what will become of the bear cubs.

–Grizzly bear image (generic) is courtesy of the USFWS

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Great white hoax: Viral image showing diver 'taming' large shark is not what it seems

Viral shark image since pulled from Facebook

By Pete Thomas

An image showing a diver taming a great white shark with a gloved hand placed on the snout of the predator whipped up a social media frenzy over the weekend, as viewers debated the validity of the photograph.

There were no details regarding the image, other than this description on the Perth & WA Fishing Reports Facebook page: “My bro sent me this photo taken of a local diver near Augusta [Australia] pushing away this great white with his glove on the nose. When done right it temporarily sedates the shark. My face would be not as apparently calm.”

Was the image photoshopped? The shark looks inert. The shark looks dead. There’s not enough water movement for this to be real. Is the diver brave, or stupid?

These were some of the assumptions and allegations appearing on various comment threads as the image was shared thousands of times.

But the truth was revealed Monday by the West Australian, which reported that the shark was in fact a dead mako, not a great white.

It appears to have been a joke gone bad. The man who sent the image to Perth and WA Fishing Reports, and was listed as the photographer (Ben Chase), asked that the post be pulled, which it was early Monday.

Shark on the left is similar to the mako shark on the right. Comparison photo is via the West Australian

“It is not his image and was a bit of a joke with him and his friends that unfortunately went viral,” Perth and WA Fishing Reports told me.

The West Australian reports: “After some investigation, it was found out that the great white, far from being on the hunt of fresh meat and ready to claim his next meal, was in fact a dead 2.5m Mako shark.”

The investigation was based largely on a similar photograph sent to the newspaper last month, showing an abalone diver untangling line from a dead mako shark. The shark in both images (posted above) appear to be the same shark. Similar snout markings. Similar size. Almost definitely the same mako shark that apparently died after becoming entangled in fishing lines.

So the mystery appears to have been solved, the hoax revealed.

Writes Drew Scerbo, a shark advocate and an expert who has debunked other hoaxes in the past, on Facebook:

“Looks like we only had to wait 24 hours for our answers and most of us were correct. Dead shark (said to be a 2.5m mako) was being played with by some divers in order to make the appearance of being rescued or defended against, even though it had been deceased for several days.

“There will always be people trying to pull a fast one over on the public, trying to gain notoriety for something they never actually did. It never ends and it often involves sharks.

“Incredibly sad - for many reasons. It seems no magnificent ocean dweller can be safe from exploitation - even after death.”

Massive hammerhead shark, tiger shark caught from the beach

By Pete Thomas

Two Western Australian anglers gained notoriety this week after landing an enormous hammerhead shark and tiger shark from the beach.

Jethro Bonnitcha and Joshua Butterworth, of the Esperance area, released both sharks after posing for photos.

The hammerhead measured 13 feet 6 inches. The tiger shark was not measured but was at least 12 feet long, Butterworth said.

Bonnitcha was handling the rod during both marathon battles, and nearly collapsed from fatigue during the 2.5-hour fight with the hammerhead. Butterworth assisted with the precarious beach landings, and releases.

“You can’t catch sharks like that alone,” he said, via email.

The location was somewhere in “on the mid-west coast” and the lines were baited with large fish and delivered to reef channels.

Photos of both sharks first appeared Tuesday on the Rogue Offshore Facebook page, and were widely shared and publicized.

Butterworth addressed Internet criticism from those who do not appreciate sharks being posed for photos.

"We only bring them out long enough for a photo, and water is still going over their gills,” he said. “Then it's a bit dodgy, but you have to try and lift their pectoral fins and head up and drag them back into the water with a surge of a wave.”

Butterworth later added: “We swim them back out to deeper water and spend as much time as needed to get them swimming off strong, not just swimming off. We don’t have them on the sand for long.”

The Rogue Offshore post was shared more than 2,500 times.

–Photos: Joshua Butterworth (left) and Jethro Bonnitcha with the giant hammerhead; Bonnitcha with the tiger shark; Bonnitcha with the hammerhead; both anglers releasing the tiger shark. Photos courtesy of Joshua Butterworth

Whale shark visit inspires crewman to jump overboard and ride the docile critter

 

A whale shark recently decided to nudge and loiter around a charter boat for four-plus hours off Australia’s Northern Territory, so of course one of the crew was compelled to jump in and ride the critter.

The nighttime encounter occurred 100 miles west of Darwin, and at one point the whale shark, which was feeding with its mouth open, bumped into a 15-foot tender tied to the mother ship.

“He ain’t real smart. Lucky he’s pretty,” one of the men can be heard saying in the accompanying footage.

The boat was from Cannon Charters and the commentary is from Benny “the Bushman” Sambrooks, a guide who seems to be the person jumping in to swim briefly with the whale shark.

Whale sharks are the world’s largest fish, reaching lengths of about 40 feet. They’re found in tropical seas around the world, but their migration patterns remain mysterious.

Fortunately for Sambrooks, the sharks feed largely on plankton and are harmless to humans.

 

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