Whaling cap and trade has the politics of carbon taxes

The politics is that I don't see it happening, or at least not as the primary tool for managing the problem, regardless of the merits.

Unfortunately the paywall means I can't RTFA in Nature, but here's the Washpost and an interesting take by Holly Doremus.  A pure cap/trade, which they're not proposing, would require whaling nations to buy whaling allocations they now steal from the world's common heritage for free, so politics rules that out.  The authors apparently propose allocating parts of the harvest for free to whaling nations, which raises the question of why anyone else would support it.

The other biological aspect of this issue that I haven't seen discussed stems from my understanding that the current harvest is likely significantly less than what some common whale species can handle.  Of course whalers currently ignore species restrictions and kill whatever whales they can find, but that gets arm-waved (and more could be done if the political will existed).  This proposal could result  in an increased allocation, making it more expensive for whaling opponents to buy out quotas.

I agree with Holly that there are non-economic problems with this proposal, although I disagree with her implication that an economic approach is incapable of addressing non-economic problems.  Just this one.

Holly also picked up on the same parallel I saw to attempts to buy slaves as a way to end slavery.  I wouldn't be as dismissive as she is though.  I suspect buying slaves their freedom was an important method to reduce the number of slaves in states where it was a marginal activity, making it easier for those states to move to abolition. Pennsylvania then moved to a gradual abolition of slavery in 1780, diminishing the economic impact to slaveowners by putting it off into the future.  Economic approaches have their value.

Mixed-bag NY Times article on whales

Very long NY Times Magazine article on whales being sociable with humans, mostly our local gray whales in their non-local nursery lagoons in Baja Mexico. One important piece of information I got out of it was that whales escaping from sonar and other underwater explosions show evidence of the bends because of their rapid ascent to avoid the sounds. While my view, that highly intelligent animals should be treated as if they have rights, is a minority position, there's a strong societal consensus that we shouldn't cause unnecessary pain to animals. The bends can be extremely painful in humans; we don't have any reason to assume it's better for whales.

Another interesting piece of information was the implication that only some gray whales, the "Friendlies", were sociable in the Baja lagoons while the rest kept their distance. Understanding which ones interact and which don't could go a ways towards explaining their behavior. Finally, the article pointed out that the whales weren't getting food from people, so it's not the usual reward system involved that tames wild animals. It's fascinating behavior.

Unfortunately though, the rest was quasi-New Age speculation that kept a veneer of scientific respectability by being posed as questions rather than stated as assertions. One example was when the author asked the main scientist being interviewed whether the whales' sociability showed "forgiveness" for past violence directed at gray whales (only token numbers have been hunted in the last 60 years). The scientific response should have been "your guess is as good as mine," but instead she says:

“Those are the kinds of things that for the longest time a scientist wouldn’t dare consider,” she said. “But thank goodness we’ve gone through a kind of cognitive revolution when it comes to studying the intelligence and emotion of other species. In fact, I’d say now that it is my obligation as a scientist not to discount that possibility. We do have compelling evidence of the experience of grief in cetaceans; and of joy, anger, frustration and distress and self-awareness and tool use; and of protecting not just their young but also their companions from humans and other predators. So these are reasons why something like forgiveness is a possibility.

Oh well. And this'll attract attention to the Baja lagoons, where I was hoping (selflishly) to visit sometime soon. Oh well. Maybe we can sort out the New Agey stuff and still be concerned with protecting whales and interacting with them.

UPDATE: Fresh Air interviews the article author and the main scientist, unfortunately not providing much useful information. They did add that only a small number of boats/captains are allowed to approach whales, which would reduce the riskiness of the whales' behavior.

Since not much science is being provided, I'll try a bit of speculation instead: polar bears are sometimes known to play with dogs instead of killing, avoiding, or ignoring them. My understanding is that these are seal-eating bears stuck on shore until winter ice lets them get out to sea, and they go a long time without eating. With no responsibility to feed themselves, they revert to immature play behavior, with dogs as playmates substituting for the bears' mothers and siblings.

The parallel to the whales is that the mother grays don't feed in the nursery lagoon. Other than feeding the calves, they have nothing to do but engage in play, and the humans are interesting creatures to play with.

Connecting North American newts and Australian dolphins through mediocrity

Two interesting posts from Not Exactly Rocket Science: one on the evolutionary arms race between sometimes-poisonous newts and sometimes-immune garter snakes here on the West Coast, and another on how the recently-discovered tool use by Australian dolphins seems to be learned along matrilineal lines and also a recent invention by dolphins.

In the first post, newts in some areas of the West Coast have evolved poisonous skins as deterrent to predators like garter snakes, and snakes have evolved immunity that sometimes completely defeats the poison. Interestingly, in some places there's no poison and no immunity. One possible explanation for this is that we're at a special moment in time where the evolutionary arms race hasn't yet started in all geographic areas, but I doubt it. My speculation is that the time period the two species have coexisted is far longer than the period needed to go through the arms race (or even more likely than independent evolution, that genetic diffusion from areas further along in the arms race would spread quickly to new areas).

If we apply the Mediocrity Principle and assume we're not seeing a special moment in time for newts and snakes, then something else must explain the geographic difference. Time for more speculation!

I wonder if there's an alternative cyle: 1. newts develop toxicity. 2. snakes develop overwhelming immunity. 3. newts completely lose their now-useless toxicity. 4. snakes completely lose their now-useless immunity, and the cycle starts over.

Instead of the British Columbia newts evolving behind the rest, they may just be at a different point in the cycle.

Total guessing, but fun in a geeky way.

And then there's the second link, about dolphins who use marine sponges to protect their snouts while digging out hidden fish from the muddy sub-surface (one of the full articles is here). One in nine dolphins use sponges, although one in two dolphins use them in the deeper waters. The dolphins only appear to learn from their mothers, and males rarely stay with their mothers long enough to learn the technique. Finally, genetic analysis suggests that a recent "Sponging Eve" invented the technique and passed it on to her descendants now using it.

That only 11% of the females in the area use the technique doesn't sound all that impressive, until you consider that half use it in the deep water, that Sponging Eve was a recent ancestor, and that a lot of the male descendant dolphins are also indirect beneficiaries. Researchers observed 41 dolphins using the techniques, so Sponging Eve seems to have done pretty well.

But how does this successful technique relate to the Mediocrity Principle? Dolphins have been big-brained for millions of years longer than hominids, yet we just happen to observe the technique within a few decades of when it was first invented?

I speculated at some other science blog that the technique was only marginally useful, but this information suggests otherwise. The Mediocrity Principle isn't absolute, and sometimes weird things happen.

On the other hand, something else might keep the sponging technique from persisting over the long term. Maybe the dolphins get too good at exposing the fish, or use up too many of the sponges that are suitable tools. Instead of a steady-state equilibrium, it's more like the newts and snakes. The dolphins over-exploit their environment and either the tools or the fish disappear from accessible habitats, and then the dolphins forget the technique until it's reinvented.

It's all guessing, but it satisfies the Mediocrity Principle. Fortunately, it's also easily tested - just wait a century or so and see if the dolphins over-exploit the environment.

(And with that, I may be offline for awhile, so Happy New Year everyone.)

Notes on de Waal's "Tree of Origin"

Some random notes on Frans de Waal's "Tree of Origin: What Primate Behavior Can Tell Us about Human Social Evolution," a book I had mentioned briefly in another post.

• Page 47: says modern hunter-gatherer tribes rely more on plant foods, usually gathered by women, than by meat hunted by men. Vegetarians love to say this too. Maybe right today, but there's a bias in relying on modern tribes as a reference. They've been pushed out from the coasts and the most fertile hunting grounds by "advanced" groups, and have to make do with the wastelands. I'll bet most hunter-gatherers had more meat than modern groups did.
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• Page 64: contrasting human breeding patterns to chimps, it says "the nuclear family relies on paternity certainty." I think modern paternity testing plus the availability of abortion may change genes affecting human personality - the male genetic strategy of "cuckolding" without having to invest resources in the offspring works less well, the male strategy of monogamous investment in children no longer carries the risk of being cuckolded, and "straying" females are more likely to abort pregnancies that might be the result of a liason.
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• Page 143: in the last 1.9 million years, hominid sexual dimorphism has stayed roughly the same, despite massive changes in brain capacity. Gender dimorphism generally gives some clue about sexual relations. Our moderate level of sexual dimorphism suggests moderate polygyny, again very different from our chimp and gorilla relatives. Interesting that this has been stable through our ancestral species too.
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• Page 168: larger apes seem smarter than smaller monkeys, despite having similar neocortex/body size ratios. The book says that one explanation besides a better-wired brain is that "rather than relative neocortical enlargement, absolute size is what matters. When the total brain volume reaches a certain point, the ability to perceive and organize the structure of instrumental behavior emerges." My comment is, what about cetaceans? If only a small fraction of a sperm whale's 20-pound brain exceeds what's needed for body control, that's likely to be a scary amount of brain matter available for cognition. The author goes on to suggest that testing whales would be interesting, although I'd guess that experimental testing of adult sperm whales would be a challenge.
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• Pages 180-183: the most interesting part of the book. Neocortex/body size ratios for primates correlate positively along a line for each primate species typical group size. Applying the same neocortex ratio to humans gives a group size of 150, which the author argues fits well with the group size found for hunter-gather clans. Humans have other group sizes, he argues, but they're either much larger or much smaller than the 150 figure. And he claims modern groups fit similar size structures. The apogee of the neocortex ratio can be found with Neandertals, who could theoretically manage slightly larger groups than we can.

Like I said before, it's a good book and well worth reading.