Saving Seafood

RAY HILBORN: Keep eating fish; it’s the best way to feed the world

June 3, 2019 — This week, the National Marine Sanctuary Foundation (NMSF) is convening Capitol Hill Ocean Week in Washington, D.C. Additionally, President Trump has declared the month of June “National Ocean Month” in recognition of the importance of the ocean to the economy, national security, and environment of the United States.

For the duration of Ocean Week, Saving Seafood will share materials related to the sustainable and economically vital U.S. commercial fishing and seafood industries, including information tied directly to events being organized as part of the NMSF conference.

To kick off the week, Saving Seafood is sharing the following article on the importance of eating fish to global food security and the environment. It was written by renowned fisheries scientist Dr. Ray Hilborn and published by the Oxford University Press Blog last week:

The famous ocean explorer, Sylvia Earle, has long advocated that people stop eating fish. Recently, George Monbiot made a similar plea in The Guardian – there’s only one way to save the life in our oceans, stop eating fish – which, incidentally, would condemn several million people to starvation.

In both cases, it’s facile reasoning. The oceans may suffer from many things, but fishing isn’t the biggest. Earle and Monbiot’s sweeping pronouncements lack any thought for the consequences of rejecting fish and substituting fish protein for what? Steak? That delicious sizzler on your plate carries the most appallingly large environmental costs regarding fresh water, grain production, land use, erosion, loss of topsoil, transportation, you name it.

Luckily for our planet, not everyone eats steak. You’re vegan, you say, and your conscience is clean. An admirable choice – so long as there aren’t too many of you. For the sake of argument and numbers, let us assume that we can substitute plant protein in the form of tofu, made from soybeans, for fish protein. Soybeans need decent land; in fact it would take 2.58 times the land area of England to produce enough tofu to substitute for no longer available fish. That extra amount of decent arable land just isn’t available – unless we can persuade Brazil, Ecuador and Columbia to cut down more of the Amazon rainforest. We would also add 1.71 times the amount of greenhouse gases that it takes to catch the fish.

And, again for the sake of argument, were we to substitute beef for fish, we would need 192.43 Englands to raise all that cattle and greenhouse gases would rocket to 42.4 times what they are from fishing.

But aren’t there alternatives that we can eat with a clean conscience? It depends. First, we must accept the inescapable truth that everyone has to eat. You and I and another few billion humans right down to the single cell organisms. The second inescapable truth arises from the first but is often ignored, is that there is no free lunch. The big variable in this business of eating is deciding the appropriate price to the environment.

Read the full opinion piece at the Oxford University Press (OUP) Blog

Ocean biodiversity in peril due to overfishing and climate change

May 31, 2019 — The biodiversity of the world’s oceans is declining in a manner unlike any time in human history.

A recent report from the United Nations paints a dire picture for wildlife around the globe, in both land-based and marine environments. About two-thirds of the marine environment has been significantly altered by human actions and climate change has the potential to make the situation much worse, the report said.

The report, from the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity Ecosystem Services (IPBES), was written by nearly 150 expert authors from 50 countries who assessed global changes over the last five decades. Only the initial summary of the report has been released; the full report is expected to exceed 1,500 pages and will be released later this year.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

5 Innovations In Aquaculture Worth Catching On To Now

May 30, 2019 — Aquaculture is one of the fastest growing forms of food production in the world and the fastest growing sector in the livestock industry. In a $140 billion market, startups in seafood and aquaculture technology raised $193 million in 2016, which marked a 271% increase from the two years prior combined. The latest group of innovations in agtech could very well come from the water, as something we could call “aquatech.”

Yet there are many areas in this industry that are in dire need of innovation. Today, I will focus on my top 5: disease prevention, vaccine delivery, fish meal replacement, sustainability solutions (including closed-loop farming) and supply chain management.

Tremendous opportunity exists right now for those interested in investing in the solutions to these issues. Let’s take a look at the five key areas mentioned, and how several forward-thinking companies are meeting them head on.

Disease prevention is a critical aspect of aquaculture. Changing ocean temperatures and water quality make animals and plants more stressed and susceptible to disease, yet innovation is lacking in prevention compared to land-based agriculture. Terrestrial food animal farmers can easily deploy dozens of vaccines and preventive solutions, while aquaculture has less choice and significant delivery challenges (more on this below). Vaccines are still administered by hand, and there simply aren’t good preventive measures for many infestations.

Read the full story at Forbes

It’s Time to Be Honest about Seafood

May 28, 2019 — Demand for seafood is increasing across the globe, and the United States is no exception. Aquaculture, or aquatic farming, is increasingly meeting this demand and now supplies just over 50 percent of all seafood globally. In fact, it has been one of the world’s fastest growing food sectors for years.

The U.S. is the largest importer of seafood in the world, and some of Americans’ favorites—including shrimp, salmon and tilapia—are predominantly farmed these days. Yet, we contribute less than 1 percent of the world’s total aquaculture production. This means we rely heavily on other countries to satisfy our appetites for seafood.

If the U.S. does not increase its domestic production of farmed shellfish, seaweed and finfish, the divergence between what we consume and what we contribute to the global seafood market will continue to widen. This gap may make it harder for our seafood diets to be sustainable. It also means the U.S. won’t have a hand in shaping the standards or economies that contribute to the seafood sector as a whole in the future.

A brand-new bill that proposes a moratorium on commercial permits for marine finfish aquaculture facilities in U.S. waters could serve to widen this gap, and it represents another divergence: between public wariness about domestic aquaculture operations and the science showing aquaculture’s potential for sustainable growth.

While wild-caught fisheries have hit “peak fish” domestically and globally, with limited potential for additional sustainable growth, there is mounting scientific evidence that the U.S. could dramatically increase domestic aquaculture production and do so sustainably, as we did with our fisheriesbefore they peaked. And this growth does not have to come at the cost of our wild-caught fisheries or other priorities for our oceans, especially under careful management and planning.

Read the full story at Scientific American

Two groups studying how to make fisheries more climate-resilient

May 28, 2019 — With a growing consensus that climate change is causing drastic transformations of marine ecosystems and fish stock dynamics, two recent studies have addressed the importance of taking a more adaptive and responsive approach to their management.

The first study, published in the ICES Journal of Marine Science, shows that adjusting fishing levels when fish populations change is key to making global fisheries more climate-resilient. The result of making this shift would be healthier oceans and a more stable supply of fish for consumption, according to scientists at the Environmental Defense Fund and the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Their paper outlines the fact that many commercially important fish stocks are vulnerable to the effects of climate change, and that managing those stocks sustainably in the future will be a large and growing challenge for fisheries scientists and managers. The paper recommends responsive harvest control rules (HCRs) that automatically reduce catch percentages when decreases in biomass are detected, and increases when biomass increases. By adopting HCRs, “inherent resilience” could be introduced into the system, reducing the adverse effects of climate change while longer-term solutions are sought to better address the negative impacts of global warming.

“Using the right harvest-control rule is like having adaptive cruise control for your fishery,” said Jake Kritzer, a senior director of Environmental Defense Fund’s Oceans program and lead author of the paper. “When you need to slow down, the system can automatically adjust to the right level. Then, when the road ahead is clear, it allows you to return to a higher level.”

Warmer waters caused by climate change are resulting in lower reproduction rates in fish and forcing them to migrate out of their natural ranges. The current system for managing fish catches is often not adaptive enough to respond to these dynamics, the report noted. In addition, current catch levels are being calculated on biomass that may be incorrect as a result of these large-scale changes, the report found.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Millions of Salmon in Norway Killed by Algae Bloom

May 24, 2019 — About eight million farmed salmon have suffocated in northern Norway over the past week as a result of persistent algae bloom, an industry body estimated on Thursday, a blight that some experts suggest has been aggravated by climate change.

Norway is a dominant producer of farmed salmon, and the economic impact of the bloom is significant.

A statement from the Norwegian Directorate of Fisheries estimated the amount of salmon lost at 11,600 metric tons, worth about 720 million kroner, or more than $82 million. An industry group, the Norwegian Seafood Council, suggested the total could be much higher.

“Preliminary numbers point to eight million dead fish — corresponding to 40,000 metric tons of salmon that won’t reach markets,” Dag Sorli, a spokesman for the council, said in an email on Thursday. He put the value of the losses at 2.2 billion kroner.

Read the full story at The New York Times

Where Did the Right Whales Go?

May 23, 2019 — Something happened to the population of North Atlantic right whales in the last decade, as their numbers shrank and fewer calves were born.

Scientists had long speculated that a change had occurred in the whales’ sources of food. By 2017, only 411 animals were counted, down from 482 in 2010. A paper published this month in the journal Oceanography, links warming in the Gulf of Maine with the life cycle of the copepod Calanus finmarchicus, a tiny shrimplike creature that forms the foundation of the right whale diet.

Although it is hard to prove cause and effect, the paper’s lead author, Nicholas Record, said the study connected “the big ocean-scale climate changes” in the North Atlantic with the water coming into the Gulf of Maine and the whale’s food resources.

“All of these pieces lined up together really well,” said Dr. Record, senior research scientist at the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences, a nonprofit institute in Boothbay, Maine. “It was really kind of stunning.”

An influx of warm water near the ocean floor in 2010 significantly reduced the abundance of the shrimplike creature in the Gulf of Maine that summer and fall. Warmer water would have brought in fewer Calanus and also meant that more died and were eaten earlier in the season, Dr. Record said, leaving less food, “right when right whales need their last big meal before winter.”

The whales followed the Calanus populations elsewhere, including to Cape Cod Bay and to the Gulf of St. Lawrence in northern Canada. Their shift in location may have created even bigger problems for the overall population, when they might have been hungry and moved to places with heavy shipping traffic.

Read the full story at The New York Times

Vanishing Bering Sea ice threatens one of the richest U.S. seafood sources

May 16, 2019 — When ice failed to cover much of the eastern Bering Sea between Alaska and Russia in early 2018, oceanographer James Overland chalked it up to a freak chance. Then, it happened again this year, with late-winter sea ice falling to some of the lowest levels seen in at least 4 decades.

Now, scientists are studying whether this is the meteorological equivalent of drawing the ace of spades twice in a row, or another sign of the systemic changes sweeping the Arctic as a result of climate change. “I’m not ruling out that we really have a new regime over the Bering Sea,” says Overland, who works at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA’s) Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory (PMEL) in Seattle, Washington.

A lasting shift could dramatically transform a region with some of the nation’s most valuable fisheries and indigenous communities whose way of life relies on ice. Already scientists have documented changes in algae as well as zooplankton, fish, and seabird populations. The shifts are “a bit of a warning sign that these things can happen rather quickly,” says Robert Foy, the Juneau-based science and research director for NOAA’s Alaska Fisheries Science Center, which is headquartered in Seattle.

Read the full story at Science Magazine

How is climate change affecting fishes? There are clues inside their ears

May 15, 2019 — Climate change affects all life on Earth, but it poses unique challenges for aquatic species. For example, as water warms it holds less dissolved oxygen than cooler water. As a result, the world’s oceans, coastal seas, estuaries, rivers and lakes are undergoing a process known as “deoxygenation.”

When dissolved oxygen levels fall to about 2 milligrams per liter – compared to a normal range of roughly 5 to 10 mg/L – many aquatic organisms become severely stressed. Scientists call this low oxygen threshold “hypoxia.”

Globally fisheries generate US$362 billion annually. Scientists are already forecasting loss of fish biomass due to warming water. But can we measure effects on fish directly?

For some climate change impacts, the answer is yes. Increasingly, a window on the secret lives of fishes is opening up through study of tiny, calcified formations inside fish skulls called otoliths – literally, “ear-stones.”

Rocks in fish heads

Many people may be surprised to learn that fish have ears, and in many cases an acute sense of hearing. Modern fishes have three pairs of otoliths that form inside small sacs underneath the semi-circular canals of their inner ears and function as part of the fish’s hearing and balance system. (Species with skeletons made of cartilage, such as sharks and rays, lack otoliths.)

Otoliths are made of calcium carbonate, mostly in a form called aragonite, which is similar to the material that makes up hard corals and clam shells. Otoliths can be smaller than sand grains or as large as a fava bean. They grow as the fish grows throughout life, which makes them interesting for fish biologists. In environments where water temperature changes seasonally, sequences of opaque and translucent zones form in fishes’ otoliths over the course of a year, like tree rings. And amazingly, young fish deposit tiny increments on a daily basis.

Read the full story at the Times Union

Life in the North Atlantic depends on this floating seaweed

May 15, 2019 — ‘THERE’S NOTHING LIKE it in any other ocean,’ says marine biologist Brian Lapointe. ‘There’s nowhere else on our blue planet that supports such diversity in the middle of the ocean—and it’s because of the weed.’

Lapointe is talking about a floating seaweed known as sargassum in a region of the Atlantic called the Sargasso Sea. The boundaries of this sea are vague, defined not by landmasses but by five major currents that swirl in a clockwise embrace around Bermuda. Far from any mainland, its waters are nutrient poor and therefore exceptionally clear and stunningly blue.

The Sargasso Sea, part of the vast whirlpool known as the North Atlantic gyre, often has been described as an oceanic desert—and it would appear to be, if it weren’t for the floating mats of sargassum.

The seaweed may seem unremarkable at first glance—just bunches of drifting plant matter—but as Lapointe has helped illuminate through his work, sargassum is the basis of a complex ecosystem that nurtures a stunning array of marine life. It serves as a mobile shelter and a movable feast.

For 36 years Lapointe, a biologist with Florida Atlantic University’s Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute in Fort Pierce, has combed the Sargasso Sea, observing sargassum by satellite and experiencing it firsthand in scuba gear. He wanted to figure out where the weed comes from, how it moves, what it sustains, and what sustains it—and to unravel the complex relationship sargassum has with other forms of marine life, from seahorses to great white sharks. Only by learning about this vital resource, he says, can we protect it from potential threats, such as ocean acidification and pollution.

Read the full story at National Geographic