July 9, 2020 — The International Union for Conservation of Nature’s recent Red List publication has indicated that the North Atlantic right whale is now officially classified as “critically endangered.”
The classification is reserved for animals that are on the brink of extinction in the wild. Currently, its estimated that only 400 right whales remain, and of those, only one-quarter are reproductive-aged females capable of producing more calves.
May 6, 2020 — The following was released by the International Seafood Sustainability Foundation:
The International Seafood Sustainability Foundation (ISSF) announced today recent appointments to its Board of Directors and Environmental Stakeholder Committee.
ISSF’s Environmental Stakeholder Committee (ESC) elected Bill Holden of the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) its Chair. In that role, he also joins the ISSF Board of Directors, replacing long-time Board member Dr. Bill Fox, formerly of WWF-US, who recently retired.
“The leadership and expertise displayed by Dr. Bill Fox, both as a member of the ISSF Board and the Environmental Stakeholder Committee, as well as a partner at WWF, has been invaluable,” said ISSF President Susan Jackson. “We are thankful for Bill’s guidance and commitment to ISSF and our collaborative work toward sustainable tuna fisheries and ocean health.”
In addition, Sara Lewis of FishWise and Dr. Tom Pickerell of the Global Tuna Alliance have joined the ESC.
“It’s always a pleasure to have new experts and advocates join our committees. These additions are serious assets to our conservation initiatives,” Jackson said. “Bill Holden joining the ISSF Board of Directors as Chair of our ESC is notable. It is the result of an enhancement in ISSF governance: the ESC elects its chair and that chairperson is then elevated to an additional leadership role as a member of the ISSF Board. Bill is well suited for this newly expanded role.”
Jackson added, “Sara Lewis’ devotion to transparency and traceability at FishWise makes her an ideal candidate for the ESC. And we welcome Dr. Tom Pickerell’s scientific guidance and collaboration once again as he returns to the ESC in his new role leading the Global Tuna Alliance.”
Dr. Bruce Collette, from the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), retired from the ESC in January. He had been with the committee since its inception.
“Dr. Collette worked with ISSF on the ESC since the beginning,” Jackson added. “His fisheries expertise made him an invaluable asset to the committee, where his passion for tuna conservation is dearly missed.”
March 26, 2019 — Overfishing is rapidly pushing many of the world’s sharks and tunas toward extinction. The world’s fastest known shark, the shortfin mako, for example, was recently uplisted to endangered on the IUCN Red List, its decline mostly attributed to overfishing.
But researchers are only beginning to figure out where and when people fish them the most. Now, a new study has some answers.
By analyzing the trails of more than 900 fishing vessels and more than 800 sharks and tunas in the northeast Pacific, researchers have identified regions where the two tend to overlap. This information, researchers say, can be used to manage fisheries, especially in the high seas, the swaths of ocean that lie beyond the jurisdiction of individual countries.
“These fish [sharks and tunas] may travel thousands of miles every year, crossing international boundaries and management jurisdictions,” said Timothy White, lead author of the study and a graduate student in biology at Stanford University, California. “In order to sustainably manage them, we need to know where they migrate and where people fish them, but this info is surprisingly difficult to gather for sharks and tunas of the open ocean.”
February 7, 2019 — University of Exeter researchers, studying the DNA of shark products sold in fishmongers, fish and chip shops, and Asian wholesalers in England, believe they have uncovered serious cases of mislabeling and a potential trade in critically endangered species.
However, their findings have been largely dismissed by the National Federation of Fish Friers (NFFF), which said in a statement that the fish sold in fish and chip outlets is all legally sourced.
The scientists found that 90 percent of products sold at fish and chip shops under umbrella terms such as huss, rock salmon, and rock eel, were actually spiny dogfish (Squalus acanthias). Landings of this fish into the European Union by E.U. and third-country vessels have been prohibited from the Northeast Atlantic since 2011 because it is classified as critically endangered on the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) red list of threatened species.
Other species identified include blue sharks, Pacific spiny dogfish, nursehounds, and starry smoothounds, most of which are not in threatened categories, but they only made up a small minority of the samples.
May 9, 2018 — PORTLAND, Maine — Federal fishing managers are considering allowing commercial fishermen to take a species of endangered skate that is currently prohibited.
Fishermen catch skates for use as food and bait on both coasts. They are currently prohibited from possessing barndoor skates, or bringing them to shore. Barndoor skates are considered endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says proposed changes to the skate fishery include an allowance for limited possession of barndoor skates. The new rules weren’t yet in place on May 1, which was the start of the new fishing year, and the skates are still prohibited at the moment.
Read the full story from the Associated Press at the Washington Post
January 18, 2018 — Federal ocean managers say it might be time to move the East Coast population of the world’s largest turtle from the United States’ list of endangered animals.
An arm of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has received a petition from a fishing group asking that the Northwest Atlantic Ocean’s leatherback sea turtles be listed as “threatened” but not endangered under the Endangered Species Act. The giant reptiles, which can weigh 2,000 pounds, would remain protected under federal law, but their status would be changed to reflect some improvement in the overall health of their population.
According to the Sea Turtle Conservancy, the number of nesting leatherback females worldwide is between 34,000 and 36,000.
NOAA officials have said the agency has reviewed the petition from New Jersey-based Blue Water Fishermen’s Association and found “substantial scientific and commercial information” that the status upgrade may be warranted. The agency now has about eight months to make a decision about the status of the turtles.
Leatherbacks live all over the world’s oceans and have been listed as endangered by the U.S. since 1970. They can be seen regularly during the summer in the Gulf of Maine, where they feed on a variety of jellyfish and occasionally get tangled in fishing lines.
Read the full story at the Bangor Daily News
December 21, 2017 — Each year between February and June, the fish gather to spawn in Mexico’s Colorado River Delta. The fish, a type of croaker called the Gulf corvina, meet in water as cloudy as chocolate milk. It’s a reunion for the entire species, all members of which reproduce within a dozen-mile stretch of the delta.
When the time is right, a few days before the new or full moons, the male fish begin to sing. To humans, the sound is machine guns going off just below the waterline. To female fish, the rapid burr-burr-burr is a Bing Crosby croon. Make that Bing cranked up to 11.
Marine biologists who recorded the sound describe the animals as the “loudest fish ever documented,” said Timothy J. Rowell, at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California. Rowell and Brad E. Erisman, a University of Texas at Austin fisheries scientist, spent four days in 2014 snooping on the fish with sonar and underwater microphones. The land surrounding the delta is desolate, Rowell said. Fresh water that once fed wild greenery has been diverted to faucets and hoses.
But the delta is alive with the sound of fish. “When you arrive at the channels of the delta, you can hear it in the air even while the engine is running on the boat,” Rowell said. Sound is measured differently in water than in air; still, the fish are as loud as lawn mowers, Rowell said.
Read the full story from the Washington Post at Science Alert
December 13, 2017 — Federal wildlife officials say they are reviewing the status of a sea turtle that lives in the northwestern Atlantic Ocean to see if it should be listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.
The National Marine Fisheries Service says it is conducting the review of the Northwest Atlantic population of leatherback sea turtles. The turtles live all over the world, including off of the mid-Atlantic states, New England and Canada.
Leatherbacks are listed as vulnerable by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. The fisheries service says it’s collecting comments until Feb. 5 about whether the northwestern Atlantic’s population should be included on the U.S.’s endangered list.
Read the full story from the Associated Press at the Portland Press Herald
August 9, 2017 — The Trump administration on Tuesday chose not to list the Pacific bluefin tuna as an endangered species, rejecting a petition by the largest global conservation group that the U.S. is a member of, with France, South Korea, Australia, and several other countries.
The Commerce Department’s National Marine Fisheries Service announced the decision after a 12-month review of the request that started under the Obama administration.
In response, environmentalists are organizing an international boycott of sushi restaurants, decrying what they say is the startling reversal of the agency’s original intent to list the tuna under the Obama administration.
The agency said that it looked at all factors affecting the bluefin tuna’s habitat, and based “on the best scientific and commercial data available … and after taking into account efforts being made to protect the species, we have determined that listing of the Pacific bluefin tuna is not warranted,” the agency said in a notice published in the Federal Register.
The International Union for Conservation of Nature had petitioned the U.S. government to list the tuna after assessing “the status of Pacific bluefin tuna and categorized the species as ‘vulnerable’ in 2014, meaning that the species was considered to be facing a high risk of extinction in the wild,” the notice read.
May 26, 2017 — It is just past midnight, rain clouds stalking a full moon, and Julie Keene is out on a muddy riverbank in thigh-high rubber boots and a camouflage jacket, a headlamp strapped over her hair.
As she wrestles with an oversize fishing net, Keene tells how she went from rags to riches, and that’s not a story many fishermen tell.
Just a few years ago, the sardine factory in her hometown of Lubec had closed, and Keene was scrounging for a living digging clams and gathering periwinkles from the beach.
“We were so damn poor we were on food stamps,” Keene said.
Then came what for Maine was the equivalent of a gold rush. It was slimy, squirmy baby eels — in such demand in Asian markets that they were suddenly more profitable than even the beloved Maine lobster.
One memorable night in 2012 when the baby eel were running strong, Keene was paid $36,000 — in cash — for her catch.
“I almost threw up. I felt like I had robbed a bank. I couldn’t grasp the concept of that much money,” Keene recalled.
The eel rush allowed Keene, the daughter of a lighthouse keeper, to buy a small farm, a tractor and a truck. She even started a retirement account.
Government regulators have since stepped in to slow the fishing frenzy, but with American glass eels fetching $1,200 a pound and up, federal and state authorities have launched a wide-ranging criminal investigation to halt what has become a multimillion-dollar international smuggling industry that is threatening the survival of the much-maligned species.
Eleven people have pleaded guilty in Maine and South Carolina since last year to illegally trafficking in baby eels, and two more are awaiting trial.
“Skyrocketing prices for juvenile American eels in Asia have led to a surge in poaching and trafficking in this unique species, threatening to wipe it out in the rivers of the Northeast,” Dan Ashe, then director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, said when the case was announced in October.
Europe has had serious problems. The eel population has declined by 90% across the continent over the last 30 years, and with the fish now considered critically endangered there, exports to Asia have been banned.
In the United States, the American eel was at “very high risk” of extinction in the wild as of 2014, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature.