SEABIRDS: SOOTY SHEARWATERS, YOLO, MUTTONBIRDS, TĪTĪ

No other bird has so consistently and for so long integrated Pacific ecologies as the sooty shearwater, a species that takes on central importance in Pacific history as well. These modestly sized birds (15–20 inches in length) have, from an unknown antiquity, migrated annually throughout nearly the entire width and length of the Pacific Ocean. Their travels trace a figure eight from the austral summer in New Zealand and the Bass Strait in Australia, northward to California and Alaska, westward to Siberia and Japan, then sometimes south to the Chilean coast before returning to New Zealand around September.¹⁰ Shearwaters expend enormous amounts of energy and time to take advantage of seasonal abundances of fish and squid in transitional latitudinal zones in either hemisphere. In the North, they concentrate their feeding along the upwelling systems of the California, Japanese, and Kamchatka coasts and along the Emperor Seamounts in between the continents. In the South, they feed in the subantarctic Southern Ocean as well as the southern Polar Front.¹¹ This migrational-feeding strategy, despite its risks, has paid off handsomely for the species, which numbers among the most abundant in the world.

With such great numbers and such vast travels, shearwaters have played a key role in Pacific ecosystems from pole to pole and from hemisphere to hemisphere. In the words of one biologist, the birds “integrate peak oceanic resources on a global scale throughout the year.”¹² The meaning of this phrase works two ways—first, the Pacific was an integrated space for shearwaters, a place that existed as a whole in whatever conception they may have formed of it. Secondly, shearwaters, through their wide-ranging generalist predation, have exerted a similar force throughout Pacific ecosystems on fish and squid populations. While shearwater numbers may be small in comparison with fish populations in the Pacific, predators exert an outsized influence on the makeup of ecosystems, especially when they feed at high trophic levels (the measurement of a number of species below them in a food chain), as sooty shearwaters do.¹³ The numbers can be shocking. “Each year,” according to recent research, sooty shearwater off the Oregon coast “consume … as much as 22% of the annual production of pelagic fish.” While migrating in the boreal autumn, the birds “consume twice as much energy per day than the peak of any of the other species.”¹⁴ This impact—and the way it integrates the Pacific—can be shown in reverse as well, as shearwater numbers depend to a large degree on oceanic conditions far from their breeding grounds. Contemporary analysis of the bird’s abundance in New Zealand, for example, has demonstrated that it is correlated with weather regimes in the North Pacific in the year prior.¹⁵

Thus, to understand species assemblage and abundance at nearly every point in the Pacific, it is not enough to know that place’s primary productivity (the amount of energy available to living creatures), but also the presence of shearwaters. When humans began exploiting the birds in large numbers, they were unknowingly taking hold of one of the ocean’s most powerful levers, with the potential to reshape ecosystems nearly everywhere from New Zealand to Japan to Oregon to Chile. Shearwaters were, metaphorically, the local fault line that could send tsunami waves to unseen and still unimagined shores (see figure 1.3).

There is some disagreement about when the birds came under sustained exploitation, but all agree it resulted from the first great human migration in the Pacific—Polynesian voyaging. In particular, the tail end of the eruption of humans out of Melanesia and into the open Pacific, beginning around 1200 BCE, brought humans and shearwater histories together in Aotearoa New Zealand. Polynesian expansion everywhere decimated bird populations, as much through the introduction and depredations of the kiore—the Polynesian rat—as through human predation. If anything, New Zealand saw greater impacts on the aviafauna than elsewhere in the Pacific, as human immigrants found no alternative terrestrial sources of protein there.¹⁶ Aotearoa’s South Island (Te Wai Pounamou), and especially the far south’s Murihuku, are the most important breeding places in Polynesia for shearwaters—called tītī by the Māori colonists and muttonbirds by later British colonists.¹⁷

Archaeologist Atholl Anderson deems the eighteenth century the most probable start for sustained Māori hunting of the birds, but archaeological evidence suggests that a date as early as 1470 might have seen at least intermittent harvesting.¹⁸ Historian Michael Stevens believes that the harvest of shearwaters increased substantially with the arrival of Europeans to Murihuku in the early nineteenth century, as they brought with them dinghies that proved more effective than the Māori canoe, the waka.¹⁹ On Rakiura/Stewart Island and the nearby “muttonbird” islands, Māori would raid shearwater burrows just as the fledglings (called muttonbirds at this stage) were getting ready to fly, thus at their fattest but still easy to catch. They were then eaten fresh or preserved in kelp, practices still vital to some iwi (tribal) identities. Estimates of the catch vary widely, but some early twentieth-century reports claim 200,000–250,000 birds taken annually.²⁰ This is a small dent indeed in an estimated global population of over twenty million, but combined with the introduction of rats, shearwater populations have likely suffered several serious depletions in their history since human colonization.²¹ Given shearwaters’ importance for Pacific ecosystems everywhere, much of the ocean must have changed as well.

While we can only surmise the Māori’s prehistoric impact on the rest of the Pacific, at least one piece of concrete evidence has appeared. The onset of Murihuku muttonbirding, especially if assigned an early date, likely played a significant role in Northeastern Pacific human economies. In one of the most important midden sites on the Northwest Coast, near Grey’s Harbor in present-day Washington State, shearwater remains appear as a significant prey species for inhabitants of the early tenth century—likely Coast Salish—but then nearly entirely disappear by the 1500s. Archaeologists rule out local overexploitation as a cause of shearwater decline, and though some of the disappearance could be due to a warming ocean, other similar birds that also depend on coastal upwelling do not drop out of the record. The most likely explanation for shearwater disappearance at Grey’s Harbor, then, was human exploitation elsewhere. The only known location around the shearwater’s range that was then experiencing increased hunting pressure was colonial Aotearoa. It seems likely, then, that Māori muttonbirding in Murihiku directly impacted Northwest Coast culture at least five hundred years ago. Whatever the cause of decline, the Salish people had to refocus hunting attention on smaller murres, scoters, and ducks.²² This remarkable story presents an early lesson in the power of the ocean and the air to transmit change quickly and over vast spaces. As early as 1500 CE, before Magellan first sailed across the entire Pacific, these two distant corners of the ocean had been brought together, even if these two societies had no knowledge of each other.

WHALES: GREYS AND BOWHEADS

As with human and shearwater migrations coming into contact, the movements of whales and humans in the North Pacific have deep linkages. Siberian peoples likely crossed the Bering Strait and migrated southward down the American coast just as gray whales were beginning to colonize the seas north of Mexico (a similar synchronization can be traced between human and salmon migration).²³ Scientists have recently determined the extent of these whales’ epic peregrinations from Russia’s Sakhalin Island all the way to the sheltered lagoons of Baja California, a journey of over fourteen thousand miles.²⁴ Meanwhile, from the Southern Hemisphere, some blue whales move from summer feeding grounds in the Antarctic to their presumptive breeding areas off Costa Rica. Whales normally do not feed in their warm-water haunts, so their impact on tropical oceans is slight, but they are the most important species in high-latitude Pacific ecosystems, where their eating and swimming rearranges life and churns up rich nutrients.²⁵

Pacific peoples hunted whales in Japan, Chukotka, Alaska, British Columbia, and Washington State (and, speculatively, in Oregon) by at least eight thousand years ago, while Europeans first entered the Pacific for whales in the late eighteenth century.²⁶ Takes in lower latitudes were relatively small. Chukchi and Inupiat in the far north were more active, but as they mostly hunted bowheads, whose migrations are relatively short, their heavy impact on the whales’ numbers barely affected others around the Pacific. But commercial whaling began reshaping the Pacific from the start; the hunt for migrating sperm whales off the coasts of Chile, Japan, and along the equator was the most important factor in bringing Euro-Americans in contact with Pacific Islanders. Hawaiians, Māori, Evenki (from Siberia), Fijians, and other Pacific people joined the scouring of the seas for moving wealth and energy, a large-scale integration of people and place that probably peaked in the mid-nineteenth century.²⁷

The darkest side of these migrant ecologies stripped of whales became particularly apparent in the North Pacific after 1848. That year, Yankee whalers first began killing bowheads in the Bering Strait. Though initially the hunting ground was far from the Inupiat and Chukchi farther north who depended upon the whales, the killing choked off this narrow line of energy into the cold north, and those living in the north began to weaken and starve. In 1872, an American whaler wrote, “Twenty years ago whales were plenty and easily caught, but the whales have been destroyed and driven north, so that now the natives seldom get a whale.”²⁸ Foreigners killed some 7,000–9,000 of the creatures, and by 1856 whalers abandoned the Bering Strait grounds.²⁹ In both Siberia and Alaska, people began to die in the thousands; in the 1870s on St. Lawrence Island bodies were reportedly “everywhere in the village as well as scattered along in a line toward the graveyard for half a mile inland.”³⁰ Fast-moving diseases buttressed this starvation and shared its dark, distant origination. Other species, such as fur seals and smaller whales, may have even then been taking advantage of this hole in the ecosystem to experience population growth, but few northern Pacific humans remained to profit from this possible boon.³¹

Elsewhere, Indigenous people both participated in pelagic Pacific whaling and felt its effects most keenly. The Makah people, with a whaling tradition stretching back at least two thousand years, began selling whale oil to European hunters in the 1840s. They continued killing seven to ten whales, mostly gray whales, per year through the early 1900s, equal to—or more than—European shore stations at the same time. However, the Euro-American pelagic hunt exploded at the same time, and—crucially—expanded to whales’ calving grounds in the subtropical Pacific. In 1845, American whalers discovered the gray whale lagoons in Baja California, and in several short seasons devastated the population. Biologists estimate that gray whale numbers were reduced from around 24,000 to 2,000 by the 1880s, work done mostly far from the Makah homeland, but whose effects were felt perhaps most keenly there.³² As historian Josh Reid has written, Makah whalers, unnerved by their declining success, engaged in ever more elaborate ritual preparation for the hunt to try to coax profits from the dwindling number of whales. Some blamed the intense brightness of a new lighthouse nearby for scaring away the whales, while one hunter claimed—perhaps not completely in jest—that the new smell of coffee on their breaths was keeping the whales away. But the real cause was thousands of miles distant. The Makah engaged in one last ceremonial hunt in 1928 and then ended whaling for the next seventy years.³³ The whales’ disappearance also imperiled the Makahs’ financial and political independence, a threat resulting in significant part because of the long-distance integration of the Pacific Ocean.

Bereft of whales, Makah and other Pacific people turned increasingly to fur seals, another long-distance migratory species, which ranges from California to Siberia. Now it was the Indians’ turn to cut the thread of migration as they purchased mechanized ships capable of intercepting the seals while they migrated through the open waters of the North Pacific. “Sealing from ships allowed this tribal nation to expand Makah marine space,” as Reid puts it, from local waters “to the south off the coast of California, to the north in the Bering Sea, and eastward [sic] to Japan.”³⁴ Canadian First Nations people joined this hunt, which also brought in Japanese sealers before it was ended by international treaty in 1911. Thus, the Pacific’s migratory connections not only had the potential to cut Indigenous people off from the ocean but also opened new opportunities for their own migrations.

These stories repeated themselves in altered form nearly a century later, as massive fleets of industrial whaleships colonized the Pacific, especially from the 1950s.³⁵ While the greatest beneficiaries of sail whaling might have been non-target species such as fins and seis who now had much more food to themselves, the industrial whaling of the twentieth century cut huge holes in every species. The Soviet Union made attempts to shield the Chukchi from a second starvation by guaranteeing them access to the hunt, and the United States tried to wean the Inupiat onto processed foods instead of whale, but neither could stop the changes that crested through ecosystems far from whaling’s focal points in the Antarctic and the North Pacific. While some nations worried about pelagic whaling’s effect on their own shore-based industries, it was whales’ ceaseless movements that nations like Russia referenced to resist effective conservation of whales. If they restrained themselves from catching the creatures, the Soviets argued, then the whales would simply fall prey to the Japanese (with equivalent bogeys postulated elsewhere).³⁶

As whales disappeared, fish took their place as the dominant factor in ecosystems from New Zealand to Alaska, boosting the commercial industries that were developing there from the mid-twentieth century.³⁷ At the same time, the mysterious declines of sea lions, fur seals, and sea otters dating from the 1970s have been traced to increased predation by killer whales that used to prey on their larger brethren and have now been forced to expand their diets down the food chain.³⁸ Whales thus integrate the Pacific not only over space but also over time, as the effects of a now-discontinued whaling industry continue to show themselves on the ocean forty years later. The eating away of these medium-sized mammals came just as Indigenous Pacific people, like Aleuts, Haida, and others, had returned to these creatures as part of reclaiming their pre-colonial cultural traditions. Thus, unlike muttonbirds, whales’ contribution to Pacific integration has come largely in the form of tragedy—as the heralding angels of the Euro-American plagues of starvation, disease, and dispossession; and then in a second wave as the ghosts of ecosystems past. If Indigenous Pacific peoples often jumped at the chance to follow whales around the ocean, they then returned to local seas radically impoverished by their prey’s absence.

FISH: TUNA

The removal of whales gave opportunities for other species, such as Pacific tuna, to boom. Tuna vie with whales and shearwaters for the extent of their distribution around the Pacific; found almost everywhere from Oregon to Australia, they are especially abundant in one of the prime whaling grounds of the nineteenth century, “the Line,” or the seas around many-islanded Micronesia—especially around the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM), Kiribati, the Marshall Islands, Palau—and parts of Melanesia, including Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands.³⁹ Tuna migration is also among the most complex in the Pacific. Notably, some tuna species migrate mainly east-west, rather than north-south as do whales and shearwaters. Yellowfin tuna (Thunnus albacares), commercially the most important species, consists of at least three sub-populations, with adults migrating and juveniles staying close to shore. Skipjacks (Katsuwonus pelamis) move east then back west to spawn in the tropical Pacific.⁴⁰ The largest and most valuable of the Pacific species—the bluefin (Thunnus thynnus)—spends its youth in the Western mid-latitude Pacific before traveling east to feed in the California Current (as the irradiated fish mentioned in the introduction helped demonstrate), with some adults then traveling to the South Pacific.⁴¹ Like the other species discussed here, tuna feed at a high trophic level and thus exert powerful downward pressure on ecosystems. Similarly, by virtue of their long lives and long migrations, they “reduce temporal and spatial variations in ecosystem structure”—in other words, providing stability and similarity over large parts of the equatorial and temperate Pacific.⁴²

While tuna have been important food for tropical Pacific Islanders for a long time, they were not staple foods for any, with the possible exception of those living in Kiribati.⁴³ The fish were found relatively far offshore and were in constant movement—Japanese, Micronesians, and Polynesians all caught them, but in small numbers. Even such small-scale work required years of study of complex tuna migration routes in order to become productive. Local tuna fisheries, though, would be quickly overwhelmed by the introduction of industrial trawling. For example, the traditional tuna fishing grounds of one man in Tokelau (a group of atolls north of Samoa) was big enough to occupy a modern purse seiner for less than an hour.⁴⁴ Those seiners, which deploy a wall of netting that scoops up huge numbers of fish, followed the initial movement of Japanese long-liners, catching fish with individual poles, into the North Pacific in the 1920s.⁴⁵ Soon thereafter, Japanese fishermen entered Southeast Asia and Micronesia, especially after inheriting the region’s German colonies after World War I.

Meanwhile, scattered American ventures were beginning the first surveys of open-ocean tuna fishing as early as 1899, looking at various parts of the central Pacific from Guam to Tahiti to the Galapagos.⁴⁶ World War II’s Pacific theater afforded more chances—and motivation—to follow up these lone ventures, and in 1944, a team of scientists led by University of Washington biologist W. M. Chapman explored much of the central and western Pacific looking for commercial possibilities. As Chapman reported, “The region from the Gilberts east to the Marquesas and south through the Fiji, Cook, Tonga, Samoa, Society and Tuamoto [sic] islands have never been exploited commercially for tuna.… It is in this great area that the expansion of the American tuna fishery will first enter.”⁴⁷ It did, especially in American Samoa, where Americans built a large cannery in 1949.⁴⁸ Nor did defeat in war long stem the tide of Japanese expansion, as their fishermen returned to these same waters from the 1950s, now establishing canneries and fishing bases as well. Soviet, South Korean, Taiwanese, and Chinese seiners followed from the 1980s. Filipino and Indonesian fishermen often did (and do) the work on board the seiners, making the tuna fishery another great motor of Pacific human migration.

A major question facing the early developers of the tuna fishery was the interrelationship between various fish populations. To their dismay, the fishermen learned there was little possibility of drawing clear lines between them.⁴⁹ What is more, large oceanographic changes, such as the El Niño phenomenon, could move tuna from one end of the Pacific to another for seasons at a time.⁵⁰ As the United States and Japan were increasingly engaged in catching tuna near other countries’ shores, they dusted off arguments made in the whaling industry about the absurdity and impossibility of ceding control of fish to any one nation. However, determined to protect their own waters from Japanese salmon fishermen, who were then expanding into Siberia and Alaska, Americans also insisted on the right to protect fisheries imperiled by overharvest.⁵¹

But in an era of decolonization, the story of whaling would not repeat itself with tuna. Pacific Island countries and Latin American nations fronting the Pacific argued instead that they maintained exclusive rights to catch the fish when they were in territorial waters, as they constituted part of a country’s biomass.⁵² Each side, it should be noted, made arguments that were most likely to benefit their own fishermen or potential fishermen. In 1952, Ecuador and Peru, whose waters American tuna seiners were mercilessly exploiting for bait fish, cooperated with Chile, which was concerned about Soviet whaling ships, to insist on a 200-mile exclusive economic zone (EEZ) around their coastlines.⁵³ The United Nations ratified this concept in the 1982 Law of the Sea. Though the United States never signed the convention, it respects it in practice.

In this new regulatory environment, tuna fishing in the central Pacific exploded further. However, with a highly migratory fish like tuna, national jurisdiction proved only of minor assistance in dealing with the problem of management. The two-hundred-mile EEZ is equal to only a day-and-a-half’s journey for a bluefin.⁵⁴ Thus, while EEZs have been profitable for Pacific Island nations, which can now lease out their territorial waters to better-capitalized fishing fleets, migrating fish have also encouraged something equally consequential for Pacific history—large-scale, regional cooperation. The South Pacific Forum, where regional leaders met, had existed since 1971, but it gained significant coherence and power in response to foreign tuna fleets. In 1976, Papua New Guinea and Fiji decided they needed to present a common front toward outside fishing nations, and discussion in the Forum led to the creation of the Pacific Islands Forum Fisheries Agency. The Agency has proved to be the strongest form of cooperation among Pacific nations, a “shining example” of regional cooperation.⁵⁵ Particularly notable was the so-called Palau Arrangement, instituted in 1992, which has been termed “the largest and most complex fishery management ever to be put in place.”⁵⁶ The Arrangement enjoins cooperation among all member states to limit the overall fishing effort in place across a large portion of the tropical Pacific; as such, it benefits both Pacific Island states and the state of tuna stocks.

It is worth noting that none of this cooperation—which has rippled out from fisheries management to encompass many other matters—would have made much sense if tuna migrated from north to south instead of primarily from east to west. A north-south migrational pattern would instead have delivered fish to Japanese, Korean, and other trawlers whenever they left South Pacific waters and merely encouraged as quick and thorough a destruction of tuna stocks as possible.

In the early twenty-first century, the Forum Fisheries Agency has not yet solved the problem of overfishing tuna—researchers believe yellowfin, bluefin, bigeye, and even skipjack numbers are in decline.⁵⁷ Distant fishing by other outside fleets has seriously eroded tuna stocks that migrate past the Cook Islands, hampering plans to create a domestic industry there.⁵⁸ Still, in 2008, Kiribati created the world’s largest Marine Protected Area, banning fishing in a tuna-rich 157,626 square mile portion of its EEZ (the Phoenix Island Protected Area), and in 2011, the Forum Fisheries Agency set aside a huge amount of the Eastern Pacific for hook-and-line fishing only.⁵⁹ These measures are interesting not only for their ambitious attempts at preserving an important part of the Pacific ecosystem but for the way they came out of regional agencies and concepts of marine tenure developed in large part in response to the migratory habits of tuna and—earlier—whales. If Pacific tuna do indeed survive into another century, it will be in large part thanks to the integration of Pacific politics and identities that responded to the integration of Pacific ecosystems.⁶⁰

CONCLUSION

Of course, stories of the Pacific’s expanse and expansive identities—from Polynesian migrations to post-colonial diasporas—have been the lifeblood of Pacific history since at least the 1990s.⁶¹ Historians have described Pacific Worlds in constant motion, as people have created social connections around the ocean and formed various conceptions of large oceanic communities that sometimes qualify as an entire Pacific World.⁶² A deeper focus on the migrations of non-humans reinforces these narratives. But it does more. It also helps us recognize that the Pacific World is not just a human creation, but a world that created connections between humans. These connections have not always been immediately apparent—Northwest coasters had no notion their shearwaters disappeared because of Māori migration—but they played important roles in the way Indigenous histories, Euro-American colonialism, and post-colonialism developed in the Pacific. The extraordinary integrating force possessed by migrating predators demonstrates that a closely connected Pacific World has long been in existence.

This Pacific World, though, does not stick to canonical geographies or chronologies. Muttonbird connections reveal that the North Pacific was long connected to the South; though the human migratory streams across the Bering Strait and through Melanesia were quite different, all alighted on a shared ocean. In fact, humans from Siberia to the Northwest Coast shared connections with each other and with humans in the South Pacific that were sometimes stronger than connections with those living behind the inland barrier of high mountains springing from the Pacific’s tectonic hyperactivity.⁶³ North Pacific people again found themselves tightly bound to distant ecosystems as an era of sealing and whaling washed them into a colonial Pacific unified by a squalid search for living commodities at any cost.⁶⁴ Only in the late twentieth century, when industrial tuna fishing rose so quickly to such a great extent, do we see a South Pacific so interwoven. While Alaskans and Siberians, in particular, are still often thought of as particularly isolated, an awareness of the intense relationship they have often had with migratory animals makes their worlds begin to look much, much larger—in short, like a Pacific World.⁶⁵

This Pacific World also has a distinct chronology. The histories of the three species discussed suggest the Pacific was first integrated in about 1500 at a few important birding sites around its four corners. As whaling exploded after c. 1815, important connections between the temperate and tropical Pacific were created, connections that did not always cross the equator, but looked very similar in both halves of the ocean, and that paralleled the increasing voyaging of Pacific peoples. Finally, an era of industrial fishing that began in earnest after 1945 left nearly no portion of the ocean detached from another, especially along the tuna migration lines across the equatorial and subtropical Pacific (and the salmon commons of the temperate North not discussed here). Perhaps this does not constitute one Pacific World, but it does hint at much larger and much deeper Pacific Worlds than historians have noticed.

NOTES

1. 1. In fact, in small quantities, the tuna was deemed safe for human consumption. See “Study Finds Only Trace Levels of Radiation from Fukushima in Albacore,” http://oregonstate.edu/ua/ncs/archives/2014/apr/study-finds-only-trace-levels-radiation-fukushima-albacore (accessed January 14, 2016); see also Daniel J. Madigan, Zofia Baumann, and Nicholas S. Fisher, “Pacific Bluefin Tuna Transport Fukushima-Derived Radionuclides from Japan to California,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 109, no. 24 (June 12, 2012): 9483–9486.

2. 2. Eric Jones, Lionel Frost, and Colin White, Coming Full Circle: An Economic History of the Pacific Rim (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993), 6; David Igler, The Great Ocean: Pacific Worlds from Captain Cook to the Gold Rush (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 11.

3. 3. Matt Matsuda, Pacific Worlds: A History of Seas, Peoples, and Cultures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 5.

4. 4. David Hanlon, “Losing Oceania to the Pacific and the World,” The Contemporary Pacific 29, no. 2 (2017): 290.

5. 5. See especially Martin W. Lewis and Karen Wigen, The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).

6. 6. Martin W. Lewis, “Dividing the Ocean Sea,” Geographical Review 89, no. 2 (April 1999): 188–214.

7. 7. For a history of tsunamis in the Pacific and transnational efforts to predict and react to them, see Walter C. Dudley and Min Lee, Tsunami! (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1998); Laura Kong, ed., Pacific Tsunami Warning System: A Half-Century of Protecting the Pacific, 1965–2015 (Honolulu: International Tsunami Information Center, 2015).

8. 8. Tagging of Pelagic Predators website, www.gtopp.org (accessed January 7, 2016).

9. 9. Greg Dening, Beach Crossings: Voyaging across Times, Cultures, and Self (Melbourne: Miegunyah Press, 2004), 15.

10. 10. Scott A. Shaffer et al., “Migratory Shearwaters Integrate Oceanic Resources across the Pacific Ocean in an Endless Summer,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 103, no. 34 (2006): 12799–12802, 12799.

11. 11. H. Weimerskirch, “How Can a Pelagic Seabird Provision Its Chick When Relying on a Distant Food Resource? Cyclic Attendance at the Colony, Foraging Decision and Body Condition in Sooty Shearwaters,” Journal of Animal Ecology 67 (1998): 99–109.

12. 12. Shaffer et al., 12799.

13. 13. Trophic level 4.3 according to one analysis carried out in the North Pacific. See Patrick Gould, Peggy Ostrom, and William Walker, “Food, Trophic Relationships, and Migration of Sooty and Short-Tailed Shearwaters Associated with Squid and Large-Mesh Driftnet Fisheries in the North Pacific Ocean,” Waterbirds 23, no. 2 (2000): 165–186.

14. 14. Stewart T. Schultz, The Northwest Coast: A Natural History (Seal Rock, OR: Timber Press, 2011), 94.

15. 15. Rosemary Clucas, “Long-Term Population Trends of Sooty Shearwater (Puffinus griseus) Revealed by Hunt Success,” Ecological Adaptations 21, no. 4 (June 2011): 1308–1326, 1323.

16. 16. Especially since Polynesian colonists failed to bring pigs or chickens with them, or, as some speculate, simply let these species die when they encountered the massive, flightless, protein-rich moa birds.

17. 17. There is some evidence shearwaters may have once been present in large numbers on New Zealand’s North Island as well.

18. 18. Atholl Anderson, “Historical and Archaeological Aspects of Muttonbirding in New Zealand,” New Zealand Journal of Archaeology and Natural History 17 (1995): 35–55; Anderson, “The Origin of Muttonbirding in New Zealand,” New Zealand Journal of Archaeology 22 (2000): 5–14; Michael Stevens, “Muttonbirds and Modernity in Murihuku: Continuity and Change in Kai Tahu Knowledge” (PhD diss., University of Otago, 2009), 57.

19. 19. Stevens, 57.

20. 20. Anderson, “Aspects of Muttonbirding,” 38.

21. 21. Anderson, “Origins of Muttonbirding in New Zealand,” 9.

22. 22. K. M. Bovy, “Global Human Impacts or Climate Change? Explaining the Sooty Shearwater Decline at the Minard Site, Washington State, USA,” Journal of Archaeological Science 34 (2007): 1087–1097.

23. 23. Dick Russell, Eye of the Whale: Epic Passage from Baja to Siberia (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001), 23.

24. 24. Jane J. Lee, “A Grey Whale Breaks the Record for Longest Mammal Migration,” National Geographic, April 14, 2015; Bruce Mate et al., “Critically Endangered Western Gray Whales Migrate to the Eastern North Pacific,” Biology Letters 11, no. 4 (April 2015), https://doi.org/10.1098/rsbl.2015.0071.

25. 25. Though whale carcasses that sink to the bottom of the ocean have recently been found to be key components of ecosystems wherever they fall. See Craig R. Smith, “Bigger Is Better: The Role of Whales as Detritus in Marine Ecosystems,” in Whales, Whaling, and Oceanic Ecosystems, ed. James A. Estes, Douglas P. Emaster, Daniel F. Doak, Terrie M. Williams, and Robert L. Brownell, Jr. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 286–302. For whales’ active role in reshaping their environment, see Joe Roman et al., “Whales as Marine Ecosystem Engineers,” Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 12, no. 7 (September 2014): 377–385. Whales occupy a slightly lower trophic level than do shearwaters or tuna, at 3.2–4.4, though killer whales are even higher at 4.6; see D. Pauly, A. W. Trites, E. Capuli, and V. Christensen, “Diet Composition and Trophic Levels of Marine Mammals,” ICES Journal of Marine Science 55 (1988): 467–481.

26. 26. Victor Krupnik, Arctic Adaptations: Native Whalers and Reindeer Herders of Northern Eurasia (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1993), 185; Margaret Lantis, “The Alaskan Whale Cult and Its Affinities,” American Anthropologist 40, no. 3 (July–September 1938): 438–464; on Oregon, see Hannah P. Wellman, Torben C. Rick, Antonia T. Rodrigues, and Dongya Y. Yang, “Evaluating Ancient Whale Exploitation on the Northern Oregon Coast through Ancient DNA and Zooarchaeological Analysis,” Journal of Island and Coastal Archaeology 12, no. 2 (2017): 255–275.

27. 27. Arrell Morgan Gibson, Yankees in Paradise: The Pacific Basin Frontier (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1993); Ryan Jones, “The Environment,” in David Armitage and Alison Bashford, Pacific Histories: Oceans, Lands, People (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2014).

28. 28. “Shipmaster,” Friend, Honolulu (March 1, 1872).

29. 29. John Bockstoce, Whales, Ice, and Men: The History of Whaling in the Western Arctic (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1986), 346, 347.

30. 30. Edward William Nelson, The Eskimo about Bering Strait (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1900), 269.

31. 31. The ecological dimensions of whaling and walrus-hunting are described in Bathsheba Demuth, Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait (New York: W. W. Norton, 2019), Chapters 2, 3.

32. 32. Springer et al., “Whales and Whaling in the North Pacific Ocean and Bering Sea,” in Whales, Whaling, and Oceanic Ecosystems, 246.

33. 33. Josh Reid, The Sea Is Our Country: The Maritime World of the Makahs (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015), 172, 175.

34. 34. Reid, 177.

35. 35. For an overview of twentieth-century whaling, see John Nicolay Tonnessen and Arne Odd Johnsen, The History of Modern Whaling (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982).

36. 36. See, among many examples, V. K. Arsen’ev, “Doklad,” April 7, 1921, State Archive of Primor’ye Krai, Vladivostok (GAPK), F. 633, Op. 4, No. 100, p. 42. For a comprehensive treatment of the commission that attempted to regulate whaling, the International Whaling Commission, see Kurkpatrick Dorsey, Whales and Nations: Environmental Diplomacy on the High Seas (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2013).

37. 37. Alan M. Springer, Gus B. Van Vliet, John F. Piatt, and Eric M. Danner, “Whales and Whaling in the North Pacific Ocean and Bering Sea,” in Whales, Whaling, and Oceanic Ecosystems, 254.

38. 38. Trevor A. Branch and Terrie M. Williams, “Legacy of Industrial Whaling. Could Killer Whales Be Responsible for Declines of Sea Lions, Elephant Seals, and Minke Whales in the Southern Hemisphere?” in Whales, Whaling, and Oceanic Ecosystems, 263.

39. 39. Parzival Copes, “Tuna Fisheries Management in the Pacific Islands Region,” in Tuna Issues and Perspectives in the Pacific Islands Region, ed. David J. Doulman (Honolulu: East-West Center, 1987), 17.

40. 40. J. E. Bardach and Y. Matsuda, “Fish, Fishing, and Sea Boundaries: Tuna Stocks and Fishing Policies in Southeast Asia and the South Pacific,” GeoJournal 4, no. 5 (1980): 467–478.

41. 41. Daniel J. Madigan et al., “Reconstructing Transoceanic Migration Patterns of Pacific Bluefin Tuna Using a Chemical Tracer Toolbox,” Ecology 95, no. 6 (June 2014): 1674–1683; Madigan, Baumann, and Fisher, “Pacific Bluefin Tuna Transport Fukushima-Derived Radionuclides from Japan to California.”

42. 42. The trophic level of most deep-sea tuna caught is 4.2, much higher than most near-shore fish and nearly the same as the 4.3 of sooty shearwaters. See Timothy E. Essington, “Pelagic Ecosystem Response to a Century of Commercial Fishing and Whaling,” in Whales, Whaling, and Oceanic Ecosystems, 42.

43. 43. John Sibert, “Biological Perspectives on Future Development of Industrial Tuna Fishing,” in Tuna Issues and Perspectives, 39, 40; Roniti Teiwaki, Management of Marine Resources in Kiribati (Suva, Fiji: University of South Pacific Press, 1988), 19.

44. 44. Robert Gillett, “Traditional Fishing in Tokelau,” South Pacific Regional Environment Programme, Topic Review No. 27 (1985): 49.

45. 45. Norio Fujinami, “Development of Japan’s Tuna Fisheries,” in Tuna Issues and Perspectives, 54.

46. 46. Kate Barclay, “History of Industrial Tuna Fishing in the Pacific Islands: A HMAP Asia Project Paper,” Asia Research Centre Working Paper 169 (December 2010): 4; August Felando, “U.S. Tuna Fleet Ventures in the Pacific Islands,” in Tuna Issues and Perspectives, 94.

47. 47. Quoted in Felando, 95.

48. 48. Alfonso P. Galea‘i, “American Samoa: The Tuna Industry and the Economy,” in Tuna Issues, 191.

49. 49. Felando, 104, 105.

50. 50. Kate Barclay with Ian Cartwright, Capturing Wealth from Tuna: Case Studies from the Pacific (Canberra: ANU Press, 2007), 4.

51. 51. This history, crucial for the development of modern fisheries around the world, is expertly narrated in Carmel Finley, All the Fish in the Sea: Maximum Sustainable Yield and the Failure of Fisheries Management (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).

52. 52. Jon M. Van Dyke and Carolyn Nicol, “U.S. Tuna Policy: A Reluctant Acceptance of the International Norm,” in Tuna Issues and Perspectives in the Pacific Islands Regions, ed. David J. Doulman (Honolulu: East-West Center, 1989), 105; Finley, All the Fish in the Sea, 127.

53. 53. Finley, 127.

54. 54. C. S. Wardle, J. J. Videler, T. Arimoto, J. M. Franco, and P. He, “The Muscle Twitch and the Maximum Swimming Speed of Giant Bluefin Tuna, Thunnus thynnus L.” Journal of Fish Biology 35, no. 1 (July 1989): 129–137.

55. 55. Quoted in Barclay and Cartwright, 18.

56. 56. Transform Aqorau, “Recent Developments in Pacific Tuna Fisheries: The Palau Arrangement and the Vessel Day Scheme,” International Journal of Marine and Coastal Law 24, no. 3 (2009): 557–581, 558.

57. 57. Phil Crawford, “Pacific Island Countries Strive to Save Their Tuna Fisheries,” Pacific Ecologist 20 (2011): 42.

58. 58. Barclay and Cartwright, 63.

59. 59. Paul Christopher, “Islands Champion Tuna Ban: Pacific Nations to Restrict Fishing across a Vast Swathe of International Waters,” Nature 468 (2010): 7325; Phoenix Islands Protected Area, www.phoenixislands.org (accessed January 10, 2016).

60. 60. This kind of correspondence between political and ecological systems is described as the best practice in conservation; see Eric A. Treml et al., “Analyzing the (Mis)Fit between the Institutional and Ecological Networks of the Indo-West Pacific,” Global Environmental Change 31 (2015): 263–271.

61. 61. See, among others, Epeli Hau‘ofa, “Our Sea of Islands,” The Contemporary Pacific 6, no. 1 (Spring 1994): 147–161; Dening, Beach Crossings; Matt Matsuda, “The Pacific,” American Historical Review 111, no. 3 (June 2006): 758–780.

62. 62. Katrina Gulliver, “Finding the Pacific World,” Journal of World History 22, no. 1 (2011): 83–100.

63. 63. This is an idea I developed at more length in Ryan Tucker Jones, “Kelp Highways, Siberian Girls in Maui, and Nuclear Walruses: The North Pacific in a Sea of Islands,” Journal of Pacific History 49, no. 4 (2014): 373–395.

64. 64. Jones, “The Environment,” in Bashford and Armitage.

65. 65. As two anthropologists recently put it, “The Aleutians are among the most isolated islands in the world. Only the Middle and South Pacific islands are more remote locales for human habitation.” Allen P. McCartney and Douglas W. Veltre, “Aleutian Island Prehistory: Living in Insular Extremes,” World Archaeology 30, no. 3 (1999): 503–515, 513.