Could giving this pod of dolphins the same legal rights as humans help keep them safe?
But as they start to jump and dive, fins cutting through the air, it becomes apparent that one dolphin is missing the appendage, his body breaking the surface but without the telltale profile of his companions. His name, given to him by a local environmental group, is Orae, which literally translates as 'long', but in this context means 'wishing him a long life'.
Orae is one of about 130 Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins living in the waters surrounding Jeju. Many display scars of the increasingly dangerous lives they lead after coming into contact with discarded fishing gear that entangles and cuts into them, or through close encounters with boats or jetskis operating around the island.
Piloting the boat is someone known on the island as 'Dolphin Man', AKA Jeongjoon Lee, a Korean director known for his work on documenting and helping the bottlenose population.
'Because the dolphins cannot cut the fishing lines themselves, we decided to cut them for them,' he says. 'In one case, we had to cut wire from two different places, one was going in through the dolphin's face to its body, and another from around its tail where it had become tangled.'
Now, a coalition of campaigners and environmentalists want to take things further. They are hoping to have the bottlenose population recognised as a 'legal person', which would give them additional rights and make it easier to protect them.
The idea is part of a growing movement to recognise rights in law of nonhuman species and places, and is the first attempt in Korea to give such status to an animal.
'The idea is that if an individual or a company threatens their livelihood, then we could act on behalf of the dolphins to sue them or to take action in another way,' says Miyeon Kim, who works at Marine Animal Research and Conservation (Marc), the local NGO responsible for naming the dolphins.
'Different organisations that work with the dolphins have been pushing for this for two years now, but it's very complicated and you have to get the Korean government, as well as the citizens of Jeju, to back such a move.'
The dolphins are officially listed by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) as 'near threatened' rather than threatened, but the IUCN states that a lack of data on the dolphins makes it difficult to assess whether this status is accurate.
Some subpopulations – there are pods throughout the Indian Ocean, south-east Asia and Australia – probably face much greater threats, it says, particularly those that live close to islands.
Around Jeju these threats come from discarded fishing gear, dive and tourist boats that get too close, construction noise that affects the dolphin's use of sonar, and pollution and runoff from the island's many fish farms. The latest concern is the construction of the largest windfarm in Korea, and one of the biggest in the world, off the coast of Jeju.
Kim says part of Marc's strategy is to personalise the dolphins in an effort to get local people to relate to them better. The group has produced a booklet with each dolphin's name against a picture of their dorsal fin.
'It's important for us to be able to identify individual dolphins to be able to record scientific facts but it's also important for the islanders. People have to understand and really relate to endangered species in order for these kind of things [establishing legal personhood] to work.'
In April, there was a small but significant victory with the designation of a marine protected area (MPA) on the west side of the island, with the specific remit of protecting the bottlenose dolphins.
At the moment the rules that govern the area include things such as preventing arbitrary development in it – but these need to be tightened further, says Kim. 'The law bans more than two recreation boats coming within a 100-metre radius of the dolphins but there are a lot of different boats in that area including fishing boats, and at the moment we can't do anything about those.'
For Dolphin Man, who has dedicated so much of his time to swimming with, filming and helping the dolphins, any extra help to conserve the animals cannot come soon enough.
'Sometimes I see so many boats surrounding the dolphins all watching them and chasing them around,' he says. 'It is good that we now have a small space to begin to protect them more, but really we need to designate that whole side of the island as a protected area in order to keep them safe for the future.'
This article was supported by the Bloomberg Ocean Fund and Oceans5
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Daily Mail
12 hours ago
- Daily Mail
Tragic connection between doomed jets: How Air India, MH370 and Germanwings disasters all sparked fears their captains suffered mental health issues - as experts warn not enough is done to help pilots
Investigators probing the crash of Air India Flight 171 have turned their attention to the pilot's medical history amid fears he may have been suffering from mental health issues at the time of the disaster. Captain Sumeet Sabharwal, an experienced pilot with more than 15,000 hours flying time, was piloting the Boeing 787 Dreamliner when it plummeted into a residential area in Ahmedabad, killing all but one of the 242 people on board. Switches controlling the fuel flow to the jet's two engines were turned off shortly after take off, a preliminary report released by the Indian authorities has indicated, resulting in a catastrophic loss of power and the aircraft crashing to the ground. The investigation by India's Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau (AAIB), claimed that one pilot asked the other why he cut off the fuel, and the second pilot responded that he had not. The report, coupled with claims that Captain Sabharwal had taken bereavement leave and was suffering with depression following his mother's death, has raised questions over whether enough is being done to assess and safeguard pilots' mental health. Air India's CEO has warned that the investigation into what happened is still far from over, telling staff in an internal memo today that it is unwise to jump to any conclusions. The AAIB said the preliminary report found no mechanical or maintenance faults and that all required maintenance had been carried out, but also did not offer any conclusions or apportion blame for the June 12 disaster. While the exact cause of the crash is likely to remain unknown for some time, the aviation world is tragically no stranger to man-made catastrophes. These include those triggered by mental health crises - with experts warning that not enough is being done to support pilots and other aviation professionals. Horrifying video showed the moment the Air India jet crashed into a medical college in Ahmedabad on June 12 If included as a category in worldwide air-crash statistics, pilot murder-suicides would be the second biggest cause of fatalities in Western-built aircraft since 2012, data compiled by Bloomberg found in 2022. The most notorious crash attributed to pilot suicide, the 2015 Germanwings disaster, saw 150 passengers killed when their plane crashed into a French mountain. Investigators revealed in the days after the crash that co-pilot Andreas Lubitz had locked the flight's captain out of the cockpit to deliberately set the plane on a collision course with a mountainside. It emerged that Lubitz had suffered from depression in the past, but was later deemed fit to fly. He had searched online for ways to end his life, before researching the security of cockpit doors. As prosecutors dug deeper into what had happened, they found that the pilot had suffered from a 'severe' depressive episode before being hired - something the airline was not informed of. Just weeks before the crash, a psychiatrist diagnosed a psychosomatic disorder and possible psychosis, but Lubitz hid his sick notes. Prosecutors believed he became 'virtually obsessed' with an 'unfounded' fear of losing his vision - a condition that would surely end his career as a pilot. The findings led investigators to conclude that Lubitz had deliberately cast the plane down into the mountains in a deliberate attempt to end his own life. Aviation psychologist Marc Atherton said the incident encouraged him to get involved in the area of pilot mental health, which he felt was being overlooked. 'It was painfully obvious that the global industry had a very good process around safety for physical risks, for operational risks and for technical risks, but what seemed to be missing was a coherent approach to the mental health and performance risk of all of the safety-critical groups in the industry,' he said. Surveys of airline pilots have shown that between four and eight per cent have contemplated suicide, roughly in line with the general population. Airline pilots must undergo periodic medical examinations to keep their licences, with the profession one of very few in which employees must disclose all their health information in order to work. Captain Mohan Ranganathan, a leading aviation safety expert in India, told the Telegraph that he had heard from 'several Air India pilots' that Captain Sabharwal had 'some mental health issues.' But, he emphasised, the pilot 'must have been medically cleared by the company doctors [to fly]. They must have given the clearance certificate.' If pilots develop a mental health condition in between the exams and do not disclose it, they can be stopped from flying. This, experts say, means many conceal their health information or avoid mental health checks out of fear of being put out of work. A 2022 study found that 56.1 per cent of the 3,765 US pilots who participated in the survey reported a 'history of healthcare avoidance behaviour' due to the risk of losing their licence. After the Germanwings crash, a US panel warned that there was 'no convincing evidence' that screening for suicidal tendencies would prevent similar disasters. Another possible way to mitigate the risk of a suicidal pilot taking control of the plane away from their co-pilot was to change door designs, preventing them from being locked. The 2013 crash of a Mozambican airliner in Namibia saw pilot Hermino dos Santos Fernandes himself in the cockpit, preventing his co-pilot from entering as he made a 'deliberate series of manoeuvres' causing the crash, investigators said. But authorities have warned against changing the design of doors, saying sophisticated locks are needed to prevent cockpit invasions and hijackings. Pilot suicide was among the countless theories floated in relation to the disappearance of Flight MH370 in 2014. The Malaysia Airlines jet was on its way from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people on board when it vanished and became one of the greatest mysteries in aviation. No sign of the plane was found in a 46,000-square mile Indian Ocean search zone and the Australian-led search, the largest in history, was suspended in January 2017. In 2020, former Australian prime minister Tony Abbott claimed that top Malaysian officials believed the aircraft vanished after veteran pilot Zaharie Ahmad Shah intentionally crashed it. 'My very clear understanding from the very top levels of the Malaysian government is that from very, very early on here, they thought it was murder-suicide by the pilot,' he told Sky News. 'I'm not going to say who said what to whom but let me reiterate, I want to be absolutely crystal clear, it was understood at the highest levels that this was almost certainly murder-suicide by the pilot - mass murder-suicide by the pilot.' Zaharie's family have long strongly rejected such claims as baseless, while Malaysia's prime minister at the time of the tragedy also said there was 'no conclusive proof'. Captain Dave Fielding, chair of the International Peer Assist Aviation Coalition (IPAAC), has long campaigned for the improved monitoring of mental health among all aviation workers - from pilots to cabin crew and engineers. 'Big picture-wise, pilot mental health and performance is the new front on flight safety, and is where we should be focusing our efforts,' he said in an interview with the British Safety Council last September. The Royal Aeronautical Society (RAeS) last year published a paper on the challenges mental health issues, and the lack of support available for them, continue to pose to the aviation industry globally. Publishing the report, RAeS chief executive David Edwards said: 'Whilst the industry is doing more to support staff who are already facing mental health issues, there remains a lack of psychosocial risk management systems to prevent the development of mental health issues in the first place.' While the report has generated a significant response from around the world, industry experts agree that there is still work to be done to encourage airline pilots and other aviation professionals to come forward with mental health concerns. 'There has been much good work done across the world in this area,' Captain Fielding told MailOnline. 'But it is in its infancy and a lot more needs to be done.' IPAAC, which he chairs, is a not-for-profit which develops peer support programmes to help 'provide a vital method for safety-critical personnel in aviation to seek help for mental health and wellbeing issues.' In a statement to MailOnline, the organisation said: 'The mental health and wellbeing of all safety-critical personnel in aviation is a safety issue. 'The role of Peer Support Programmes is more critical than ever in assisting our colleagues when they need support from a friendly and confidential co-worker, trained to give specific assistance.' For help and support, call the Samaritans for free from a UK phone, completely anonymously, on 116 123 or go to
The Guardian
a day ago
- The Guardian
Could giving this pod of dolphins the same legal rights as humans help keep them safe?
It is a beautiful sunny day on the island of Jeju in South Korea and as the boat cuts through the water all seems calm and clear. Then they start to appear – one telltale fin and then another. Soon, a pod of eight or nine dolphins can be seen moving through the sea, seemingly following the path of the boat. But as they start to jump and dive, fins cutting through the air, it becomes apparent that one dolphin is missing the appendage, his body breaking the surface but without the telltale profile of his companions. His name, given to him by a local environmental group, is Orae, which literally translates as 'long', but in this context means 'wishing him a long life'. Orae is one of about 130 Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins living in the waters surrounding Jeju. Many display scars of the increasingly dangerous lives they lead after coming into contact with discarded fishing gear that entangles and cuts into them, or through close encounters with boats or jetskis operating around the island. Piloting the boat is someone known on the island as 'Dolphin Man', AKA Jeongjoon Lee, a Korean director known for his work on documenting and helping the bottlenose population. 'Because the dolphins cannot cut the fishing lines themselves, we decided to cut them for them,' he says. 'In one case, we had to cut wire from two different places, one was going in through the dolphin's face to its body, and another from around its tail where it had become tangled.' Now, a coalition of campaigners and environmentalists want to take things further. They are hoping to have the bottlenose population recognised as a 'legal person', which would give them additional rights and make it easier to protect them. The idea is part of a growing movement to recognise rights in law of nonhuman species and places, and is the first attempt in Korea to give such status to an animal. 'The idea is that if an individual or a company threatens their livelihood, then we could act on behalf of the dolphins to sue them or to take action in another way,' says Miyeon Kim, who works at Marine Animal Research and Conservation (Marc), the local NGO responsible for naming the dolphins. 'Different organisations that work with the dolphins have been pushing for this for two years now, but it's very complicated and you have to get the Korean government, as well as the citizens of Jeju, to back such a move.' The dolphins are officially listed by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) as 'near threatened' rather than threatened, but the IUCN states that a lack of data on the dolphins makes it difficult to assess whether this status is accurate. Some subpopulations – there are pods throughout the Indian Ocean, south-east Asia and Australia – probably face much greater threats, it says, particularly those that live close to islands. Around Jeju these threats come from discarded fishing gear, dive and tourist boats that get too close, construction noise that affects the dolphin's use of sonar, and pollution and runoff from the island's many fish farms. The latest concern is the construction of the largest windfarm in Korea, and one of the biggest in the world, off the coast of Jeju. Kim says part of Marc's strategy is to personalise the dolphins in an effort to get local people to relate to them better. The group has produced a booklet with each dolphin's name against a picture of their dorsal fin. 'It's important for us to be able to identify individual dolphins to be able to record scientific facts but it's also important for the islanders. People have to understand and really relate to endangered species in order for these kind of things [establishing legal personhood] to work.' In April, there was a small but significant victory with the designation of a marine protected area (MPA) on the west side of the island, with the specific remit of protecting the bottlenose dolphins. At the moment the rules that govern the area include things such as preventing arbitrary development in it – but these need to be tightened further, says Kim. 'The law bans more than two recreation boats coming within a 100-metre radius of the dolphins but there are a lot of different boats in that area including fishing boats, and at the moment we can't do anything about those.' For Dolphin Man, who has dedicated so much of his time to swimming with, filming and helping the dolphins, any extra help to conserve the animals cannot come soon enough. 'Sometimes I see so many boats surrounding the dolphins all watching them and chasing them around,' he says. 'It is good that we now have a small space to begin to protect them more, but really we need to designate that whole side of the island as a protected area in order to keep them safe for the future.' This article was supported by the Bloomberg Ocean Fund and Oceans5
The Independent
a day ago
- The Independent
The unanswered questions about Air India crash after preliminary report published
On The Ground newsletter: Get a weekly dispatch from our international correspondents Get a weekly dispatch from our international correspondents Get a weekly international news dispatch Email * SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our Privacy notice Over the weekend, the Indian Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau released a preliminary report on last month's crash of Air India flight 171, which killed 260 people, 19 of them on the ground. The aim of a preliminary report is to present factual information gathered so far and to inform further lines of inquiry. However, the 15-page document has also led to unfounded speculation and theories that are currently not supported by the evidence. Here's what the report actually says, why we don't yet know what caused the crash, and why it's important not to speculate. What the preliminary report does say What we know for certain is that the aircraft lost power in both engines just after takeoff. open image in gallery A crane retrieves part of the fuselage from the crash site ( Getty Images ) According to the report, this is supported by video footage showing the deployment of the ram air turbine (RAT), and the examination of the air inlet door of the auxiliary power unit (APU). The RAT is deployed when both engines fail, all hydraulic systems are lost, or there is a total electrical power loss. The APU air inlet door opens when the system attempts to start automatically due to dual engine failure. The preliminary investigation suggests both engines shut down because the fuel flow stopped. Attention has now shifted to the fuel control switches, located on the throttle lever panel between the pilots. Data from the enhanced airborne flight recorder suggests these switches may have been moved from 'run' to 'cutoff' three seconds after liftoff. Ten seconds later, the switches were moved back to 'run'. The report also suggests the pilots were aware the engines had shut down and attempted to restart them. Despite their effort, the engines couldn't restart in time. open image in gallery 260 people died in the crash ( Getty Images ) We don't know what the pilots did Flight data recorders don't capture pilot actions. They record system responses and sensor data, which can sometimes lead to the belief they're an accurate representation of the pilot's actions in the cockpit. While this is true most of the time, this is not always the case. In my own work investigating safety incidents, I've seen cases in which automated systems misinterpreted inputs. In one case, a system recorded a pilot pressing the same button six times in two seconds, something humanly impossible. On further investigation, it turned out to be a faulty system, not a real action. We cannot yet rule out the possibility that system damage or sensor error led to false data being recorded. We also don't know whether the pilots unintentionally flicked the switches to 'cutoff'. And we may never know. As we also don't have a camera in the cockpit, any interpretation of pilots' actions will be made indirectly, usually through the data sensed by theaircraft and the conversation, sound and noise captured by the environmental microphone available in the cockpit. We don't have the full conversation between the pilots open image in gallery People light candles in a prayer ceremony for the victims of the crash ( AFP/Getty ) Perhaps the most confusing clue in the report was an excerpt of a conversation between the pilots. It says: 'In the cockpit voice recording, one of the pilots is heard asking the other why did he cutoff. The other pilot responded that he did not do so.' This short exchange is entirely without context. First, we don't know who says what. Second, we don't know when the question was asked – after takeoff, or after the engine started to lose power? Third, we don't know the exact words used, because the excerpt in the report is paraphrased. Finally, we don't know whether the exchange referred to the engine status or the switch position. Again, we may never know. What's crucial here is that the current available evidence doesn't support any theory about intentional fuel cutoff by either of the pilots. To say otherwise is unfounded speculation. Air India flight 'was doomed' without sufficient power, explains Simon Calder We don't know if there was a mechanical failure The preliminary report indicates that, for now, there are no actions required by Boeing, General Electric or any company that operates the Boeing 787-8 and/or GEnx-1B engine. This has led some to speculate that a mechanical failure has been ruled out. Again, it is far too early to conclude that. What the preliminary report shows is that the investigation team has not found any evidence to suggest the aircraft suffered a catastrophic failure that requires immediate attention or suspension of operations around the world. This could be because there was no catastrophic failure. It could also be because the physical evidence has been so badly damaged that investigators will need more time and other sources of evidence to learn what happened. Why we must resist premature conclusions In the aftermath of an accident, there is much at stake for many people: the manufacturer of the aircraft, the airline, the airport, civil aviation authority and others. The families of the victims understandably demand answers. It's also tempting to latch onto a convenient explanation. But the preliminary report is not the full story. It's based on very limited data, analysed under immense pressure, and without access to every subsystem or mechanical trace. The final report is still to come. Until then, the responsible position for regulators, experts and the public is to withhold judgement. This tragedy reminds us that aviation safety depends on patient and thorough investigation – not media soundbites or unqualified expert commentary. We owe it to the victims and their families to get the facts right, not just fast. Guido Carim Junior is a Senior Lecturer in Aviation at Griffith University This article was originally published by The Conversation and is republished under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article
