October 3, 2022 — The following was taken from an transcript from NPR:
AARON SCOTT, HOST:
Do you remember as a kid what you wanted to be when you grew up? Maybe an astronaut, soccer star, veterinarian, the president? Well, Alfredo Giron – he remembers.
ALFREDO GIRON: When I was 7, in second grade, my mom got for me a book about marine mammals. And it was about seals, sea lions and walruses. And I just was in love with it. I was like, I’m going to be a marine biologist.
SCOTT: But as he grew up in Mexico City, he grew out of that childhood dream.
GIRON: I started thinking, no, maybe engineering in something. And eventually, I settled down for engineering, bioengineering. I was lucky enough to get into a lab where they allowed me to do all sorts of techniques that bioengineering professionals will do. And it was not my thing.
SCOTT: But the college admissions clock was ticking, and he needed to decide where to apply.
GIRON: And suddenly this ray of light illuminated that old book in the bookshelf. I opened it, and I was like, you know what? I wanted to be a marine biologist. And I remember I loved it. So I looked up online, where can I study this in Mexico, and when is the deadline to do it? The deadline was, like, one week away.
GIRON: So I just jumped for it.
SCOTT: Alfredo went on to get a Ph.D. at UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Since then, he’s focused on using data and science to make fishing more sustainable. He’s co-founded a science-based conservation initiative called dataMares and an early career oceans professionals program at the U.N.
And he now works at the World Economic Forum, an organization that cultivates leaders to influence political objectives. There, he leads the Ocean Action Agenda, with the goal of making sure the world’s fish populations thrive for years to come. It’s a huge task considering the state of the ocean and its fisheries.
GIRON: When we think about the ocean, there’s two big things to highlight. The first one is there’s a lot of degradation that has happened over the last several decades. We can see that in fisheries in some populations literally collapsing, some species shrinking over time.
SCOTT: So not just shrinking in population, but literally, the fish are getting smaller over time?
GIRON: Yes. Yes because you select for the larger ones, and they are basically removed from the population, and you keep the smaller ones but also because as you run out of big ones, you start fishing them before they can grow that big. We have also seen a lot of plastic pollution. We have seen a lot of impacts from climate change in many different ways – increased storms, coral bleaching…
SCOTT: But Alfredo sees hope, too.
GIRON: But let me stop there with the doom and gloom. Some countries have been very successful in replenishing their fish populations. We have seen an increase in the number of countries that are pledging to protect their oceans and actually, also an increase in action. We have seen a lot of companies making commitments to make sure that their supply chains are actually free of illegal activities, free of forced labor, which, surprisingly, is still an issue in this century.
SCOTT: So today on the show, finding hope in the ocean despite all of the challenges. We track Alfredo and his collaborators’ ongoing efforts to conserve the global fish population in a tale of ingenuity on the high seas. I’m Aaron Scott, and you’re listening to SHORT WAVE, the daily science podcast from NPR.
SCOTT: Alfredo, I want to start with a basic question. What makes a fishery sustainable? How do you determine the right level of fishing so that the population will continue to thrive?
GIRON: There’s a concept known as the maximum sustainable yield. Basically, how much can you extract of a population without reducing it for future catch? And this concept is based on the idea that when you have a number of fish, you expect them to reproduce at a certain level.
It’s very difficult to implement in reality because, of course, environmental variability plays a big role in how many of those newborns are successful and can join the population. Different countries, different agencies use different exact methods to estimate these things. But in the end, this is about extracting without decreasing the total number of the population.
SCOTT: Which is complicated almost beyond comprehension. I mean, we’re talking the entire ocean here, which means all the countries and the companies and the individual boats have to basically work together to make sure they’re not fishing beyond that maximum sustainable yield you mentioned. And so one of your main focuses right now is on illegal, unregulated and unreported catch, which is a whole basket of things from boats fishing in protected areas to fishing without authorization to taking more fish than they report – things that potentially mean they’re catching beyond the sustainable limits. Would you give us a sense of what sort of problem this is globally?