The witness against Japex

The shoe, it seems, is on the other foot. Now, it's the opposition to the Tañon Strait exploration that's scraping the bottom of the, um, ocean.

It was a risky move, to begin with, parading dubious characters claiming to be "marginal fishermen", mouthing even more dubious claims before the media, in an effort to prove the "detrimental effects" of Japex' activities. (One claimed having lost his average daily catch of 20 kilos. 20 kilos. No wonder he preferred to stay in the margins of the whole fishing industry)

Apparently, they proved to be unreliable witnesses. They talked too much. So, in the 28 November issue of Cebu Daily News, the oppositors presented new witnesses that had the distinct advantage of not being able to talk, at least not in a way humans could understand. Dolphins.

In the CDN article, a certain Dr. Lemuel Aragones claims that the dolphin population in Tañon Strait "declined" since the start of the exploration activities, and those that remained no longer "leap out of the water to the delight of tourists" and "showed disturbed patterns of behavior".

Dr. Aragones, of course, doesn't tell us how he divined the dolphin's behavior to be a mass boycott in protest of oil exploration. When asked to provide the link, he obfuscates:

“The area showed immediate negative effects on the surface behaviors and delayed (1 year after) negative response on the relative abundance of spinner dolphins implicating short and intermediate changes in their behavior possibly brought about by the seismic survey.”

The operative word being: "possibly".

Oh, well, if the dolphins likewise prove to be unreliable witnesses (maybe leaping out of the water has become, in dolphin pop culture, "uncool"), Dr. Aragones could always try other sea creatures. Crustaceans, for instance, are a good choice, being inherently anti-progress. Japex, of course, could hit back and charge "crab mentality".