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Ironic, Iconic, and Failing Fast
30 March 2005 by Ross Wanless

The first time I went to sea, it was on a 2 month journey to the deep Southern Ocean, into the heart of the Roaring Forties and back. It was a wild place. It was there that I first encountered the Wandering Albatross (Diomedea exulans), an incredible animal and an undisputed icon of the oceans. During the long, storm-tossed nights I spent on the bridge, I found the music from Sting's 1991 album Soul Cages struck a strangely meaningful chord, as if it were written for mariners. The album was, I later discovered, dedicated to his father, who must have been something of a sailor. In the song Jeremiah Blues, from the Soul Cages album, Sting sang:

“The government saved a dying planet
When popular icons failed”

He was, of course, being supremely ironic. But today there is a deeper irony than the one Sting probably intended. A popular icon, the Wandering Albatross, is failing, and that failure is emblematic, and possibly to become iconic, of a dying planet.

After that initial taste for long sea voyages, insanely beautiful islands and fabulous seabirds, there was no going back (or rather, it was inevitable that I would go back). Last year I found myself on Gough Island, which is perched on the 40th parallel South. My research focussed on the species of great albatross that is unique to this island, the Tristan Albatross (Diomedea dabbanena).

The albatross chicks spend the icy winter sitting on their lonely little nest mounds waiting for their parents to return with a bellyful of warm squid. Adults leave their chicks alone on these remote islands from an early age; chicks have nothing to fear, because there is nothing that bothers them, except the occasional snow storm. It's been that way for millions and millions of years. But then came people. Carelessly, voyagers from years back allowed an insignificant little beast, the common house mouse, to get ashore with them when they came to harvest seals. The mice flourished in this island world without predators. They also learned a startling behaviour. They figured out that seabird chicks don't know what to do when they are bitten (how could they, when for millions of years nothing ever had?). Now, amazingly, this massive bird (weighing up to 10 kg) is being threatened by the lowly mouse. Each winter night, the mice scurry about, hunting desperately for anything to eat that will see them through the lean, mean winter. Albatross chicks are a handsome feast for them, and it seems that many mice cannot resist. In some areas almost every chick was eaten, nibbled to a horrific death by slow degrees.

If this were an isolated case, then perhaps you could justifiably label me a “Bleeding Heart”, and move on. But it's not just Gough where things are in trouble. All around us are species that we have, in our incessant travelling, allowed to hitchhike around the globe with us. The list is long, and the effects are devastating. Just think of the wattles choking streams in the Cape, or water hyacinths destroying water bodies. Invasive species are a problem on a scale that could render this rich, beautiful and unimaginably diverse planet a dull, depauperate and unspeakably tragic place in which to live.

It is already past the time for us to realise that we must outgrow the awkward adolescence of our technological existence. Like some idiot kids on a drunken joy-ride in a stolen vehicle, we (our society) don't appear to have considered all the possible consequences of our actions. How many casualties, and how serious must those casualties be, before we realise there we are having irreversible, negative impacts on other species and whole ecosystems? There is more to our existence than today, and tomorrow may not be able to take care of itself in a way that will suit us or our children.

It's profoundly sad that the majestic Tristan Albatross might go extinct. But there is hope. We're changing the world we live in at so many levels, in so many ways, we can certainly change it for the better. I hope we do.