Ecological Damage Brings Dark Times for Black Sea : Environment: Coastal nations now are trying to check ravages of overfishing, pollution and invading species.

The Black Sea is dying while trawler captain Enver Saruhan, who has fished it for 53 years, watches with rage and incomprehension.

“It’s ridiculous, how can it die? It’s just overfishing--too many boats and those Japanese sonars,” he said, miles of fine-meshed, ocher-colored nets on the dock around him.

This Black Sea fishing village, where twin sentinels--a lighthouse and a minaret--grace a picturesque headland, is the port for dozens of trawlers like Saruhan’s.

But these are hard times. “Go to sea and see no fish. Rip empty nets on the bottom,” the captain snarled.

Scientists know why, and there is little subtlety and not much hope in the story they tell.

A California-size inland sea celebrated by fishermen and poets alike for almost 3,000 years is succumbing to relentless assault from overfishing, from pollution by the ton and from an invasive species of sea life escaped from science fiction: millions of tons of New World jellyfish that devour all in their path.

Once five times more fertile than the neighboring Mediterranean, the oval-shaped Black Sea, 160,000 square miles, is running out of oxygen, running out of fish and running out of time.

“It is the most damaged regional sea in the world,” said Dr. Laurence D. Mee, a British marine chemist who coordinates an internationally funded environmental program that is spearheading a fledgling, overmatched attempt to reverse the tide.

The future of the world’s largest landlocked sea is of direct, immediate concern to 160 million people who live in the countries that share its basin--the poorest half of continental Europe.

Cholera, noxious tides of algae and deserted tourist beaches are counterpoint to rusting boats and shuttered processing factories in six coastal states: Turkey, the biggest fisherman, and former enemies now allied in ecological alarm--Russia, Ukraine, Georgia, Bulgaria and Romania.

“There are some parallels with the Great Lakes, but they stop when you get to economics,” Mee said. “The lakes are shared by two rich countries, which spent $8.5 billion just to get rid of the sewage. We’ve got a much bigger job and no money.”

Only since the collapse of the Soviet Union have scientists been able to establish clearly just how deep are the ravages to a sea where, legend says, Jason and the Argonauts once sailed in search of the Golden Fleece.

A few years ago, it was impossible to get a clear picture of the damage because that was a Soviet state secret. Now, the picture is clear, stark and bleak. Turkish researcher Bayram Ozturk cites field research showing 20 tons of pollutants per cubic kilometer of the Black Sea--about four times higher than in the troubled Mediterranean.

“The challenge is what decisions to make. Finding agreement is not easy. Finding solutions is difficult. The coastal countries are in a bad economic state; they can’t do it themselves. Their problem is a world problem too,” said Canadian John F. Caddy, marine resources chief at the United Nations’ watchdog Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome.

Daily, more than 300 rivers, including the Danube, the Dniester, the Dnieper and the Don, dump tons of industrial, agricultural and human waste into Black Sea waters.

Beginning in Germany and flowing through six other countries, the Danube alone each year spews 60,000 tons of phosphorus, 340,000 tons of inorganic nitrogen, 60 tons of mercury, 4,500 tons of lead and 50,000 tons of oil into the Black Sea.

Intense shipping with its associated waste, the dumping of toxic wastes and shore-side mineral exploitation compound the crisis.

“The threat to the Black Sea from land-based sources of pollution is potentially greater than in any other marine sea on our planet,” Mee said.

Indeed, pollution and overfishing have made the Black Sea a parody of itself. According to FAO estimates, fish catches have dropped from around 800,000 tons annually to a current 100,000 tons in the past few years. Once, fishing economically supported 2 million people. Now plants are shut and ships laid up, their crews disgruntled.

In 1950, when the annual harvest was around 100,000 tons, low-value fish such as anchovies and sprat accounted for about a third of the total catch. The rest were the highly popular kinds of fish-eating fish: mackerel, bonito, bluefish.

Once, huge schools of these migratory species used to swarm into the Black Sea from the Mediterranean. No more. In the most polluted northwest shelf area of the sea, mackerel fishing ended in 1968, bonito fishing in 1971 and bluefish fishing in 1973.

Sadly, now that the total catch has slumped back to the levels of 40 years ago, fully three-quarters of what is being netted today is anchovy and sprat.

Commercial fishing was long a favorite tool of Soviet, Turkish and international economic developers. One result was absurd overbuilding: Caddy says there are enough processing plants around the Black Sea today to process the entire Atlantic catch. Another is that ever more boats ply Black Sea waters with ever better equipment in search of ever fewer fish.

In a classic case of unmanaged overfishing, boats from half a dozen hungry countries trawled mercilessly with huge nets and high-tech sonar. “There is nowhere for the fish to hide anymore,” Saruhan lamented as his crew and their families patched their nets.

Saruhan thinks overfishing is the prime villain, but scientists see a deadly combination of evils that have gradually sapped the sea’s ability to cope.

Converting fishing to an industry after centuries as a man-and-the-sea way of life has destroyed not only the fish but also sea creatures that feed on them, such as dolphins and seals, noted Ozturk, a fisheries expert at the University of Istanbul.

By one estimate there were 1 million dolphins in the Black Sea after World War II. Now, the population is a shadow of that--perhaps 200,000--and many survivors have contracted swine fever from polluted river waters, Ozturk said. He heads an attempt to save the cave-dwelling Mediterranean monk seals, once plentiful but now nearly extinct.

“There are a few left on the Turkish coast, but that’s all. They play a key predator role in the sea ecology. If we lose the seals, then we’ll lose the dolphins,” Ozturk said.

Black Sea sturgeon fishing is a memory. Sea otters are gone, and so are 95% of the sea grasses and most mussel beds in the northwest shelf. “The sea grass was the lung, the mussels the kidneys. Once these ecosystems start to break down, you have a disaster. Fish are no longer attracted. Water has no more oxygen,” Mee said.

The Black Sea is at once brawny and fragile. Fed by rivers rather than the oceans, its only outlet--a kitchen faucet draining a reservoir--is through the narrow Bosporus and Dardanelles straits to the Mediterranean.

Water in the Mediterranean exchanges itself about every 80 years, Caddy said. Once pollution hits the Black Sea, though, as a practical matter there’s no way out. “It would literally take thousands of years in the Black Sea for a complete change of water,” he said.

At its core, the Black Sea is more than 7,000 feet deep, but because of light and oxygen requirements only bacteria live below around 350 feet. Historically, though, life teemed in the low-salinity coastal shelf--particularly in the northwest--that makes up roughly a quarter of the entire sea.

Along came industrial society complete with dirty factories and high-intensity farming. Entry flows of freshwater dropped and salinity increased as river water was diverted upstream for agriculture. Pollution arrived with a vengeance.

“There has been an enormous increase in nutrients in the water in the past 25 years as a consequence of phosphate detergents and the intensification of fertilizers in agriculture,” Mee said. The blooming of microscopic organisms in this rich water began sapping oxygen in a cycle of exuberant life and decay. Dead organisms settle to a bottom that now smells of hydrogen sulfide--rotten eggs--in many places.

Reacting to the changed environment in the 1970s, native jellyfish that feed on the plankton exploded from a mass of about 1 million tons to 350 million tons by the early ‘80s.

But there was worse to come. Around 1982, scientists noted the arrival of a newcomer to the Black Sea, a 9-centimeter, tube-shaped creature called Menmiopsis leidyi and known as the comb jellyfish. A nuisance in Chesapeake Bay, the comb jellyfish lives all along the Atlantic Coast of the United States and may have come in the ballast of tankers returning empty to Black Sea depots.

The jellyfish, which thrives on polluted water, is an ecological dead end: It eats everything, not only plankton, but also fish eggs and larvae. It feeds voraciously. And nothing in the Black Sea eats it. In less than a decade, it has become the dominant species, growing to an astonishing mass of 700 million tons.

If they were introduced as a predator, stinging jellyfish would eat their comb-like cousins. But they would further discomfit millions of East Europeans for whom the Black Sea offers the region’s only warm-water beaches. Pacific chum salmon and Baltic Sea cod would also prosper, but marine scientists are reluctant to intervene massively in any ecosystem.

“There is justifiable prejudice against introducing new species and changing the ecology of the whole sea. On the other hand, there have been irreversible ecological changes already. We’d love to go back to the ‘30s, when the Black Sea was a fairly pristine place, but people have to have jobs in the meantime,” Caddy said in an interview at his office in Rome.

Said Mee, “The environment is already devastated, and the concept of environmental management is one which may offer the only alternative to an economically valueless system.”

The United Nations and the World Bank are helping finance Mee’s Environmental Management and Protection Program, which has $25 million over three years to set priorities on the problems and to coordinate research and fledgling cleanup efforts.

“Perhaps we have come with too little, too late, but the situation is not hopeless. If we manage it right, the sea can recover,” Mee said in his office near Istanbul Airport.

Under an agreement among coastal states that came into force this year, a secretariat in Istanbul will prepare detailed criteria for controlling Black Sea pollution.

The first Black Sea fisheries accord is due to come into effect by year’s end after groundbreaking talks in Ankara among the coastal states. It will promote information exchanges, stock assessments, codes of practices, fish farming and, perhaps, the eventual establishment of fishing quotas.

Mee points to cooperation among neighbors who seldom used to speak. Pollution monitoring equipment is in place for the first time. There is a major cleanup program for the Danube, the worst of the Black Sea’s polluters. International money is beginning to flow to improve water supplies, control sewage and establish self-sustaining municipal services in cities that used to rely on far-off Communist bureaucrats for their funds.

There is hope, Mee insists, but there are also limits. “It isn’t possible, for example, to impose pollution restrictions on industries, because they’d all have to close down. The trick is to make slow progress without killing everybody,” he said.

What impresses the small core of specialists who are working to save the Black Sea is the emerging sense of commitment and cooperation among scientists in the aching coastal countries.

Rino Coppola, an FAO computer wizard who is working to link scientists in the six nations with each other and international databases, recently returned from a meeting in Constanta, Romania.

“There is a great interest in building something in common to face a common problem,” Coppola said in Rome. “Most were biologists, and the tragedy is under their nose. They can touch it. The Turk says that the anchovies are gone, and the Russian talks about boats coming back pushing waves of jellyfish before them like snowplows.”

While the awareness of the Black Sea’s catastrophe may mark the first step toward a better tomorrow, nobody has much hope of recovering those better yesterdays.

“A return to peak (1987-88) fishing conditions seems impossible. We need to look for another way to building an economically productive ecosystem,” Caddy said.

Trawler owner Enver Saruhan began fishing the Black Sea in 1941, when he was 7 years old. He is 60 now, and he will fish until he dies. Then, in the natural way of things, his sons will sail the family boat, Saruhanlar III.

But Saruhan wonders if there will be anything left to catch.

“When I started, we relied on oars and sails. Now, there are too many boats and sonars, and there are giant tankers 300 meters long. The whole place will blow up soon,” the fisherman said. A bitter epitaph for a dying sea.