January 21, 2021 — Millions of dollars’ worth of salmon were allegedly stolen from a processing plant operated by Huon Aquaculture in Sydney, Australia.
According to reports, police have charged five people in the alleged theft of 250 metric tons of salmon reportedly amounting to AUD 4 million (USD 3.09 million, EUR 2.55 million)
December 21, 2020 — Long a topic discussed in connection with the South China Sea, illegal Chinese fishing vessels are of increasing concern for Pacific Island nations.
As recently as early this week, the archipelago nation of Palau, east of the Philippines and north of New Guinea, announced that it had intercepted and detained a Chinese fishing vessel and six smaller boats in its territorial waters after it was confirmed the vessel had entered unlawfully and was illegally fishing sea cucumber.
The fishing vessel was apprehended in Helen Reef, Palau’s most southernmost region, by a Guardian-class patrol boat that Australia had delivered to Palau in September.
“They did have sea cucumber on there… it’s estimated about 500 pounds (225 kilograms),” Victor Remengesau, director of Palau’s division of marine law and enforcement, told reporters. “It’s unlawful entry. We may care about COVID and the spread of COVID, but we can’t just let people do whatever they want, and disguise [illegal activity].”
November 23, 2020 — Australia has deployed a new underwater technology across the Torres Strait aimed at combating illegal foreign fishing, according to the Australian Fisheries Management Authority.
The Maritime Border Command (MBC), an agency within the Australian Border Force (ABF), was in charge of deploying the technology in partnership with the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organizations (CSIRO), which developed the new hydrophones. The hydrophones are capable of detecting and logging vessel sounds, which can differentiate between different kinds of vessel activities.
June 15, 2020 — When a restaurant serves a fish whole, there is a reason it fits the plate perfectly. It’s because Boris Musa grew it that way.
His indoor fish farm in Australia supplies restaurants with plate-size barramundi grown to 1.8 pounds. The coronavirus put the restaurant industry on ice for months, but Mr. Musa’s fish kept growing. That led to a big fish problem—as in, his fish were getting too big.
If Mr. Musa’s barramundi, a white fish popular in Australia, grow too much, the water-filtration system that is keeping them alive won’t be able to keep up. Once they tip the scales at about 3 pounds, he said, they’re too large for a restaurant dinner plate.
To save his fish, and his future profits, Mr. Musa is turning to science. He is betting that by lowering the water temperature in his tanks, he can slow down the metabolism of his fish, reduce their appetites and stall their growth. At the height of the lockdown, he even considered a more extreme option: trucking his fish more than 1,000 miles away to a more spacious outdoor farm owned by his company.
“This is a really peculiar set of circumstances,” said Mr. Musa, chief executive of MainStream Aquaculture, which spent years breeding fish to grow faster. “Normally in our business, we’re trying to maximize the biological potential of our fish.”
March 31, 2020 — Australia’s largest producer of Western rock lobster is the main contributor to the country’s half-billion-dollar live exports of the shellfish, but it faces a stark choice; export its live product to China using expensive cargo planes or export no live rock lobster at all.
It is the harsh reality facing seafood companies around the globe as commercial passenger airlines are grounded by the coronavirus pandemic.
“We’ve seen [passenger freight] capacity drop very significantly over the last few weeks, to the point where on Wednesday we had the last direct flight to China,” Matt Rutter, CEO of Geraldton Fishermen’s Co-operative (GFC), told Undercurrent News on Thursday (March 26).
“In fact, the last available for charter is through Japan. That last flight flies on Monday [March 30],” he said.
March 17, 2020 — The full financial effects of the coronavirus outbreak are starting to become apparent in seafood markets across the globe, reports American Shipper.
In Australia, for instance, a fisheries and aquaculture sector very dependent on Chinese seafood demand is likely to see a decline in earnings of $389 million due to the excess product that traders are unable to send to the country.
It’s a similar issue in Canada, where the previously booming trade of live Atlantic lobsters to China has ground to a halt after both China and other nearby Asian countries stopped accepting deliveries from seafood shipping companies.
Likewise, the trade of baby eels, or elvers, from Maine in the US to China is also at a standstill — bad news for a $168m industry nearly entirely dependent on the trade route for its custom.
October 24, 2019 — The following was released by the Lenfest Ocean Program:
Join us on Wednesday, November 13 at 9:00 am EST/2:00 pm GMT for a webinar featuring Dr. Mark Bravington of Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO), where he will discuss his work to improve the information used to assess and manage shortfin mako sharks in the Atlantic Ocean.
For the past several months, Dr. Bravington has been examining the feasibility of a genetic method known as close-kin mark-recapture for estimating shortfin mako shark abundance in a way that avoids the limitations and biases associated with estimates collected through fishing activities. Such a tool could help fisheries scientists develop more accurate stock assessments to inform effective management strategies for this species, which is overfished in the North Atlantic.
Download the project fact sheet to learn more.
July 26, 2019 — Research by the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies in Hobart and Curtin University in Western Australia found lobsters exposed to the air guns used in seismic surveys had damaged statocysts, an organ similar to the human inner ear.
One of the researchers, Ryan Day, said this left the lobsters with an impaired ability to right themselves when flipped over.
“They really rely on this ability to right themselves and to control when they are escaping from a predator,” he said.
The lobsters received the equivalent of a full survey passing within 300–500 metres.
“In all experiments we didn’t detect any sign of recovery, even one year after,” Dr Day said.
The results have prompted a renewed call by Greens Senator Peter Whish-Wilson for the practice to be investigated.
July 10, 2019 — Bright orange clownfish, of Finding Nemo fame, face a slew of problems in the wild, from overharvesting for home aquaria, to bleaching of their coral and anemone homes by climate change-induced warming waters. And now there’s a third prong on this deadly trident: light pollution.
Published today in Biology Letters, a new study reveals that clownfish, which are dependent on coral reefs, can’t raise any young when exposed to artificial light.
The human-made light that is spewed over Earth endangers animals across ecosystems. Nighttime lights alter birds’ nocturnal migrations. Plants bloom earlier.Sea turtles avoid nesting on brightly-lit beaches. Songbirds start warbling earlier.
“But we don’t think about underwater marine systems being potentially impacted,” says Emily Fobert, a marine ecologist at Flinders University in Australia and lead author of the study.
“I wasn’t expecting the result [in the paper] to be that nothing hatched,” says Thomas Davies, a conservation ecologist from Bangor University in Wales. “It’s quite worrying…a really big result that speaks to how light pollution can have a really big impact on marine species.”
March 6, 2019 –The Gulf of Alaska is once again experiencing a marine heatwave. This follows the infamous warm-water event known as the “blob,” that formed back in 2014, which scientists have tied to seabird die-offs and declining Pacific cod stocks.
Scientists around the world are trying to predict these events, but there are economic implications to forecasting the future.
Scientists around the world are working to understand the impacts of marine heatwaves as they become more common. They also want to predict when and where the world’s oceans will heat up.
“If I gave you this information about the future, what would you possibly even do with it?” Alistair Hobday said. “And people’s first reaction is, ‘nothing, I don’t know what I would do.’”
Hobday is a research scientist with Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation. Hobday said the predictive models for marine heatwaves are about 60 percent accurate currently, slightly better than a flip of a coin.
He wants to boost that number to 80 percent, and he said marine heatwave forecasts have practical applications.
Read the full story at Alaska Public Media