The Blue Beat

By David Helvarg America’s fish stocks are crashing faster than Wall Street stocks last July, mostly for the same reason: The sea lions are guarding the salmon pens. After months of conflict between corporate and community-based fishermen, industry processors, recreational fishers, and environmentalists, Congress now appears gridlocked on reauthorizing the Magnuson Act, America’s main fishing […]

By David Helvarg It’s not really a fixed grin, it’s the Botox. Oh, is your tape running? Sorry. Flipper DePescado here. I’m the union rep for Cetacean local 405 at the Long Beach Aquarium, but before that my family were free swimmers in Mexico and let me tell you people·Well, what can I say? Half […]

By David Helvarg Scanning the slate-gray waters of San Francisco Bay on an overcast spring day I spot more eider ducks and gulls than barges or ships. We’re patrolling past Alcatraz in a 41-foot Coast Guard utility boat that’s almost as old as its blue-eyed 30-year-old coxswain, Chuck Ashmore. Ironically, this old workhorse, with its […]

By David Helvarg A scuba vacation off the Yucatan brings a diver face to face with a hungry grouper, a shy octopus and a nosy barracuda Minutes after taking off from the Cancun airport, the prop plane banked steeply away from the coastal hotel zone, and soon we were looking down at the wild, unbroken […]

April 11, 2003 By David Helvarg My name’s Flipper O’Reilly but you may know me as K-Dog, the Atlantic bottlenose dolphin attached to Commander Task Unit 55.4.3. My picture’s been in all the papers. Not to sound too gung-ho, but when they deployed us from our pens in San Diego and said we were green-lighted […]