Saving Seafood

Ray Hilborn is optimistic fishery management can work

April 9, 2020 — If you find it hard to imagine a college professor (of a subject other than epidemiology) drawing a crowd nowadays, I’m with you. Yet that is exactly what fisheries scientist Ray Hilborn did April 2.

To a sit-in-your-office, stare-at-your-monitor webinar, no less!

It’s conceivable that the size of the audience reflected a degree of covid-19-inspired restlessness. But ennui alone cannot explain the more than 450 people who signed up for Hilborn’s presentation on the status of fish stocks and the role of management. And rather than dwindle, as webinar audiences tend to do, by the time the session ended Hilborn’s audience had swollen to “an easy 600,” according to NOAA’s Tracy Gill, who coordinated the event.

To be fair, Hilborn was no stranger to his audience. A professor of aquatic and fishery science at the University of Washington, he’s written several books, including, most recently, “Ocean Recovery: A Sustainable Future for Global Fisheries” (co-authored by his wife, Ulrike Hilborn) as well as scores of peer-reviewed papers, and is respected by industry, academics, and NGOs.

His message Thursday was reassuring – more or less. Listen to scientists long enough, and you realize that you can get yourself into trouble reading between the lines.

Many of you, for example, will recall how in 2006, mainstream journalists leveraged a study led by the Canadian ecologist Boris Worm on the loss of biodiversity in ocean ecosystems services into the disappearance of fish by 2048. “One very small part of the paper,” Hilborn recalled, extrapolated from catch trends and came up with a downward curve that “hit the y axis,” in the professor’s words, at 100 percent collapsed in 2048.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

Marine life worse off inside ‘protected’ areas, analysis reveals

December 27, 2018 — Destructive trawling is more intense inside official marine sanctuaries, while endangered fish are more common outside them, a startling analysis of Europe’s seas has revealed.

It shows that far from conserving sealife, many legal marine protected areas (MPAs) are being damaged by industrial fishing. The work has exposed “the big lie” behind European marine conservation, experts say, with most MPAs completely open to trawling.

The researchers were able to assess the activity of fishing vessels in great detail thanks to satellite tracking equipment that is now compulsory on ships. They compared this with scientific data on the health of sea areas and looked at more than 700 MPAs, covering 16% of Europe’s territorial waters. In total, MPAs cover 29% of Europe’s waters.

This revealed that commercial trawling activity was on average almost 40% higher inside MPAs than in unprotected areas. Furthermore, endangered and critically endangered fish species such as sharks and rays were five times more abundant outside the MPAs.

“It should be the reverse,” said Prof Boris Worm, at Dalhousie University in Canada, who led the research. “When something is called a protected area, it actually needs to be protected. We know that when areas are actually protected they deliver: species recover, biodiversity increases and fisheries benefit as well, as fish become more abundant and spill outside these areas.

Read the full story at The Guardian

Large-scale commercial fishing covers more than half of the oceans, study finds

February 23, 2018 — WASHINGTON — Scientists tag sharks to see where they roam in the high seas, but until now they couldn’t track the seas’ biggest eater: Humans. By using ships’ own emergency beacons, researchers got the first comprehensive snapshot of industrial fishing’s impacts around the globe. And it’s huge — bigger than scientists thought, according to a new study.

Large-scale commercial fishing covers more than 55 percent of the oceans with the world’s fishing fleet traveling more than 285 million miles a year — three times the distance between Earth and the sun, according to research in Thursday’s journal Science.

Five countries — China, Spain, Taiwan, Japan and South Korea — were responsible for 85 percent of high seas fishing.

“The most mind-blowing thing is just how global an enterprise this is,” said study co-author Boris Worm, a marine biologist at Dalhousie University in Canada. “It’s more like factories that are mass producing product for a global market and less like hunters that are stalking individual prey.”

China dominates global fishing. Of the 40 million hours that large ships fished in 2016, 17 million hours were by boats under a Chinese flag, according to another study co-author, Stanford marine biologist Barbara Block.

The fishing patterns were gleaned from 22 billion automated ship safety signals beamed to satellites. Before this, scientists had to rely on a sampling of ships’ logs and observations, which were spotty.

Ships are obeying no-fishing zones and times, although they hover at the edges of marine-protected areas. Fishing tends to drop on holidays including Christmas, New Year’s and the Lunar New Year, researchers found.

“The maps of global fishing in this report are sobering,” Douglas McCauley, a University of California, Santa Barbara marine biologist who wasn’t part of the study, said in an email.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at CBS News

 

What If We Had All Listened to NASA and Started Eating Krill?

October 5th, 2016 — Way back in 1977—the year Star Wars came out, British Airways launched Concorde SST service between London and New York, and Jimmy Carter signed legislation creating the Department of Energy—NASA published an exceptionally forward-looking report called “The Role of Aerospace Technology in Agriculture.” Its purpose was to figure out how to feed a ballooning world population given the Earth’s limited resources—using space-age technology. Oddly enough, amid high-minded discussions about the aerial application of chemicals and remote-sensing systems, was tucked this suggestion: Perhaps humans could subsist wholly—or partially—on a diet of krill.

The succinct proposal clearly fell to the wayside and remained buried in the NASA report until we happened upon it recently. It got us thinking: What if we humans had actually embraced this notion back in the day and had become a race of krill-eating beings? Was this forgotten report from the 70s a viable proposal for saving the future of mankind?

Krill, of course, are the tiny, shrimp-like crustaceans that are found near the rock bottom of the food chain. They feed on phytoplankton and—because they are protein-rich—are a primary food source for larger fish, which eventually get eaten by us. Although some nations certainly do make use of krill as a food stuff—the Japanese call it okiami, and Norwegians eat krill paste with crackers—in most of the world, krill is just used as fish feed in aquaculture. Vitamins are also made with their oil, and certain enzymes found in krill are used in various food and medical products. However, not eating them is understandable, too—krill are quite salty, and each crustacean’s hard exoskeleton must be removed before being eaten because it contains contains fluorine, which is toxic in high enough concentrations. But still, if humankind’s sustainability problems could be saved by krill, maybe we should figure out a way to use them as sustenance. Who needs Soylent or crickets if the oceans are filled to the brim with underutilized krill, right?

Evidently not.

As it turns out, the harvesting of Antarctic krill has greatly increased since the report was published, and conservationists are now increasingly concerned about its diminishing global supply. Not only do countless fisheries rely on Antarctic krill as feed, but demand for krill oil and its enzymes has skyrocketed. “It is well-known that many proposals in the 1970s were made to greatly increase food production from the sea—including harvesting krill and other zooplankton,” explains Boris Worm, a marine research ecologist and associate professor at Dalhousie University. “At the time, it was still thought that the sea could feed a rapidly growing human population, but by the 1990s, it became clear that wild fisheries could not be increased any more.”

Read the full story at Vice