Saving Seafood

Bula! Pacific Tuna Commission Gets To Work On Fishing Policies

December 6th, 2016 — Honolulu International Airport is a ghost town. It’s 1 a.m. Sunday, hours past the routine blitz of interisland travelers and down to the handful of passengers heading to far-off lands plus a few others sleeping off the disappointment of a canceled flight.

I hand over my passport to the woman working at the Fiji Airways counter, throw my luggage on the conveyer belt and hope it arrives in Nadi, where I’m going to cover the weeklong meeting of the Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission.

The commission — a treaty-based group composed of 26 members including Pacific Island nations, the United States, the big tuna players from Asia, the European Union and others — decides how to manage and conserve highly migratory fish stocks while reducing bycatch and ensuring the overall sustainability of one of the world’s biggest sources of protein.

Over the course of five full days, hundreds of scientists, government officials, nonprofit leaders and others will debate the myriad issues facing the health of tuna populations, the safety of fishing observers, the effects of climate change, the value of marine protected areas and the impact of new policies on local economies and international relations.

I was mulling this over on the plane while waiting to take off when the Boeing 737’s captain interrupted my thoughts with an update on what to expect on our way to Fiji.

Read the full story at the Honolulu Civil Beat 

Indigenous peoples of the world’s coastlines are losing their fisheries — and their way of life

December 5th, 2016 — The world loves seafood. According to some estimates, people consumed about 102 million tons of it last year.

A new study released Friday by the Nippon Foundation-Nereus Program, based at the University of British Columbia, shows that indigenous people who live on the world’s coasts are definitely hooked. They consume 15 times more seafood per capita than people in other parts of the world, about 2.3 million tons, or about 2 percent of the global catch, the study said.

They don’t simply catch and eat fish and other seafood. It’s the heart of communities, the center of culture and religion, a gift from the heavens. Seafood is crucial to the cultures of coastal indigenous people in the Americas, Asia, Africa and the Arctic, among other places, and overfishing and the ocean-wide movement of fish due to climate change could wipe those resources out.

On the coast of Africa at the equator, huge commercial ships are starting to encroach on native fishing areas as ocean stocks diminish. In places such as Madagascar, the stocks of community fisheries have been nearly lost.

“These big industrial fisheries are chasing the fish. In West Africa, larger vessels are moving closer and closer to shore,” said Andrés Cisneros-Montemayor, research associate at the University of British Columbia and an author of the study published in PLOS One. “A lot of these indigenous communities, all they have are dugout canoes.”

Read the full story at The Washington Post 

What’s A Woggin? A Bird, a Word, and a Linguistic Mystery

December 2nd, 2016 — On December 20, 1792, the whaling ship Asia was making its way through the Desolation Islands, in the Indian Ocean, when the crew decided to stop for lunch. According to the log keeper, the meal was a great success: “At 1 PM Sent our Boat on Shore After Some refreshments,” he wrote. “She returned with A Plenty of Woggins we Cooked Some for Supper.”

 Right about now, you may be feeling peckish. But you may also be wondering: What in the world is a woggin?

New species are discovered all the time. Unknown old species—extinct ones, found as fossils and then plugged into our historical understanding of the world—turn up a lot, too. But every once in a while, all we have to go on is a word. New or old, known or unknown, no one knew what a woggin was until Judith Lund, whaling historian, decided to find out.

Like all professionals, 18th-century whalers had their share of strange jargon. A “blanket” was a massive sheet of blubber. “Gurry” was the sludge of oil and guts that covered the deck after a kill, and a “gooney” was an albatross. Modern-day whaling historians depend on their knowledge of these terms to decode ship’s logs—vital for understanding the sailors’ day-to-day experiences, as well as gleaning overall trends. Being elbow-deep in whaleman slang is just part of the job.

 

Read the full story at Slate 

Fishing Amid Territorial Disputes in the South China Sea

April 8, 2016 — CATO, Philippines — As Asian countries jostle for territory in the South China Sea, one Filipino fisherman is taking a stand.

He has faced down Chinese coast guard rifles, and even engaged in a stone-throwing duel with the Chinese last month that shattered two windows on his outrigger.

“They’ll say, ‘Out, out of Scarborough,'” Renato Etac says, referring to Scarborough Shoal, a rocky outcropping claimed by both the Philippines and China. He yells back, “Where is the document that shows Scarborough is Chinese property?”

At one level, the territorial disputes in the South China Sea are a battle of wills between American and Chinese battleships and planes. At another level, they are cat-and-mouse chases between the coast guards of several countries and foreign fishermen, and among the fishing boats themselves.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at The New York Times

Indonesia Sinks 23 Foreign Fishing Boats

April 5, 2016 — JAKARTA, Indonesia — Indonesian authorities on Tuesday blew up 23 foreign vessels that were captured for fishing illegally in the country’s waters.

The boats, 13 from Vietnam and 10 from Malaysia, were blown up simultaneously in seven ports from Tarakan in northern Kalimantan to Ranai on the Natuna Islands in the South China Sea.

Minister of Maritime Affairs and Fisheries Susi Pudjiastuti witnessed the destruction, which was coordinated by the navy, coast guard and police, via live-streamed Internet video at her office in downtown Jakarta.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at The New York Times

US tuna tie-up causing skipjack prices to firm further for February

February 9, 2016 — Skipjack tuna prices for delivery in February to the Asian tuna hub of Bangkok, Thailand are firming up on the previous month, sources told Undercurrent News.

With the US vessel tie-up continuing, prices for January deliveries firmed somewhat, a trend that is looking set to continue.

A deal has been done at $1,175 per metric ton between a trader and a canner, sources in the US and Asia told Undercurrent.

The large tuna traders, a US-based executive said, are holding out for $1,200/t for the rest of the deals.

“They [the traders] are only offering around half of the usual contract monthly tonnages,” he said. “Canners tell me that $1,300/t or $1,400/t for March is talked of, but I don’t see them able to pay that.”

Read the full story at Undercurrent News

Global Supermarkets Selling Shrimp Peeled by Slaves

December 13, 2015 — SAMUT SAKHON, Thailand (AP) — Every morning at 2 a.m., they heard a kick on the door and a threat: Get up or get beaten. For the next 16 hours, No. 31 and his wife stood in the factory that owned them with their aching hands in ice water. They ripped the guts, heads, tails and shells off shrimp bound for overseas markets, including grocery stores and all-you-can-eat buffets across the United States.

After being sold to the Gig Peeling Factory, they were at the mercy of their Thai bosses, trapped with nearly 100 other Burmese migrants. Children worked alongside them, including a girl so tiny she had to stand on a stool to reach the peeling table. Some had been there for months, even years, getting little or no pay. Always, someone was watching.

No names were ever used, only numbers given by their boss — Tin Nyo Win was No. 31.

Pervasive human trafficking has helped turn Thailand into one of the world’s biggest shrimp providers. Despite repeated promises by businesses and government to clean up the country’s $7 billion seafood export industry, an Associated Press investigation has found shrimp peeled by modern-day slaves is reaching the U.S., Europe and Asia.

The problem is fueled by corruption and complicity among police and authorities. Arrests and prosecutions are rare. Raids can end up sending migrants without proper paperwork to jail, while owners go unpunished.

____

More than 2,000 trapped fishermen have been freed this year as a result of an ongoing Associated Press investigative series into slavery in the Thai seafood industry. The reports also have led to a dozen arrests, millions of dollars’ worth of seizures and proposals for new federal laws.

Read the full story at the Associated Press

 

How more Maine lobsters can be cracked by the Japanese market

November 25, 2015 — After five years of double-secret negotiations, the world has had its first look at the text of the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership trade pact. All together, the 12 nations comprise nearly 40 percent of the global economy, and Maine lobster exporters are just one group that hopes this will crack open new markets.

If the trade pact is accepted, more than 18,000 tariffs would be reduced or eliminated, including those Pacific rim nations levy on Maine lobsters.

And Maine lobster exporters see the elimination of tariffs to prized agricultural markets in Asia, especially Japan, as an opportunity to export more of the valuable commodity.

Already, Maine lobster exports have soared in value to $366 million in 2014 from $185 million in 2010, according to data from the Maine International Trade Center.

For Calendar Island Lobster Co. in Portland, exports of frozen and processed lobster are big business, accounting for nearly 60 percent of sales, with the lion’s share shipped to consumers in Asia, said Emily Lane, vice president of export sales and marketing. The trade pact has benefits for lobstermen and suppliers, Lane said.

“I think it’s going to open a lot of markets in an area of the world where there is one of the largest consumer populations,” she said.

Eyeing Japan

Already Maine lobsters are appearing more frequently on menus in Asia. Much of this growth has been in China, South Korea and Hong Kong, none of which took part in the recent trade negotiations.

With trade barriers expected to come down in other Asian emerging markets, Lane hopes to see growth in exports to that part of the world, Japan in particular.

Read the full story at Bangor Daily News

 

Absurd Creature of the Week: This Crafty Fish Turns Mussels Into Its Surrogate Parents

October 23, 2015 — Last week I wrote a little ditty about North America’s lampsilis mussels, which do unbelievable impressions of fish. And why would they? So that real fish attack them, busting loose clouds of mussel larvae that infiltrate the attackers’ gills. Here the larvae clamp onto the filaments and suck out nutrition, developing in safety until they drop out of their host. This, as you can imagine, is bad for the fish, to the point where it can kill them.

Lampsilis has the most highfalutin way of infesting fish with their larvae, but freshwater mussels the world over do it too—simply by releasing the young into the water column. There’s one group of fishes in Europe and Asia, though, that won’t suffer such parasitization without retaliation: the bitterlings. These guys flip mussels’ reproductive strategy back on them. Using a tube-like structure, the female fish inserts her eggs into a mussel’s gills, then the male fires his sperm in as well. The fertilized eggs get a nice little home in the host. The host mostly just gets embarrassed.

So let us explore the strange game that is different kinds of parasitic river critters trying to impregnate each other with their offspring.

Typically fish reproduction is about as basic as it gets in the animal kingdom. Males and females get near each other, then dump their sperm and eggs into the water. That’s it. The problem with that, though, is it opens the young up to all kinds of problems, particularly predation. Only a fraction will make it. The rest will end up in stomachs.

For the bitterling, this won’t do. Its reproduction begins with good mussels, and it’s up to the male to find them, preferably large hosts with more room to hold the young. When he chooses a victim, or even several in a given area, he posts up. Should rival males take an interest in his property, his coloration intensifies as he head-butts his foes for control of the territory.

Read the full story at Wired