Saving Seafood

How small-scale fishers are struggling amid COVID-19 crisis

May 27, 2020 — As COVID-19 affects global food systems, tremendous impacts are being felt by coastal communities and small-scale fishers, many of whom are self-employed and rely on the catch to feed their own households or local communities.

In a review published in Coastal Management, researchers explore the impacts of the COVID-19 crisis on small-scale fisheries in Canada and worldwide, and provide recommendations on how to support them.

We spoke with lead author Nathan Bennett, research associate with the Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries at UBC, and Chair of the People and the Ocean Specialist Group for the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), about the findings.

Read the full story at PHYS.org

Satellite Study Says Tuna Longliners Vastly Misreporting Compliance with Sea Bird Avoidance

February 4, 2019 — SEAFOOD NEWS — Seabirds, in particular birds like albatross, are highly vulnerable to longlines, and in some fisheries managed by the US, take of a single bird can shut down the fishery.

The IUCN (International Union for the Conservation of Nature) lists 15 of 22 albatross species as endangered.

To mitigate bycatch, the RFMO’s in the Indian Ocean, Western Pacific, and the Atlantic have mandated measures to prevent bird interactions with longlines, such as night setting, use of weighted lines to sink faster, and use of streamers to keep birds away during setting.

However, the RFMOs depend on vessel self reporting.  Apparently a large number of vessels are lying about their mitigation measures.

According to a study of satellite data released by Birdlife International, only 15% of tuna longline vessels are using night setting, the single bycatch reduction measure most effective for albatross.

But the industry has been reporting compliance with night setting at levels between 29% and 85%, depending on the fishing area.

The study looked at satellite data for 201 vessels, analyzing their movement, speed, direction of travel and time, to determine when they were night setting.  The results showed only 15% of the vessels were actually using the practice.

The findings offered a stark contrast with reports given by countries to fisheries watchdogs that suggested night-setting was used at a much higher rate by  fleets.

“The results are very disappointing,” said Stephanie Winnard, a biologist with the albatross task force, a specialist unit set up by Birdlife International and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. “By this stage you would expect a lot more vessels to be using night setting.”

The aim of the research was to encourage best practice, to which end the results will be shared with the countries whose vessels were studied.

Albatrosses, petrels and other seabirds are “irresistibly drawn” to the trailing, baited longlines, said Winnard. Each year, an estimated 100,000 birds are hooked and drowned by longline and trawl fisheries.

“This level of bycatch in the fishing industry is hugely unsustainable for birds that can take up to 10 years to start breeding,” said Winnard, who added that the findings were “truly powerful” for the way the data shed light into the “opaque world” of global fisheries and their impact on ocean biodiversity.

“No one is going to report they are not sticking to the rules or they are killing seabirds, so we now have this independent way of measuring compliance,” said Winnard. “This information has never before been public. It is usually kept behind closed doors. It will promote transparency and hold countries to account. It is the first time we’ve been able to see what is happening on individual fishing boats.”

This story was originally published by SeafoodNews.com, a subscription site. It is reprinted with permission.

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

Tracking tools identify regional hubs of whale shark activity

August 17, 2018 — Where do the biggest fish in the sea go to find enough food? Turns out, not too far, if they live in a region with lots of food.

Whale sharks (Rhincodon typus) swim about 25 kilometers (15 miles) per day and can make some tremendous long-distance oceanic movements. Scientists recently tracked a female whale shark from the eastern Pacific to the western Indo-Pacific for 20,142 kilometers (more than 12,000 miles) over 841 days, the longest whale shark migration route ever recorded.

Juvenile sharks in a series of four studies, one in the Philippines and three in the western Indian Ocean, apparently prefer to swim laps around their favorite feeding grounds.

Whale sharks are the world’s largest fish, growing up to 12 meters (40 feet) long and weighing up to 25 tons; even juveniles are 7 to 9 meters (23 to 30 feet) long. Scientists are keen to understand where these huge fish spend their time to better conserve them.

Fishing activity threatens whale sharks through direct killing, capture as bycatch, and boat strikes. Half of the world’s whale shark population has been killed since the 1980s, primarily by fisheries in China, India, the Philippines and Taiwan, and Chinese fisheries still target whale sharks for their fins and meat. The rapid decline in whale sharks’ global population prompted the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) to reclassify the species as endangered in 2016.

Read the full story at Mongabay News

Now that the IUCN World Conservation Congress in Hawaii has taken place, what happens next?

October 6th, 2016 — “If all we do is host people from around the world and have a really great conference, then we have missed the opportunity.” So said Charles “Chipper” Wichman, addressing attendees of the Hawaii Conservation Conference at UH-Hilo in August of 2015.

The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), founded in 1948, has a mission to, “Influence, encourage and assist societies throughout the world to conserve the integrity and diversity of nature and to ensure that any use of natural resources is equitable and ecologically sustainable.” Every four years they convene members, delegates and guests to the World Conservation Congress (WCC), most recently held in Jeju, Korea (2012) and Barcelona, Spain (2008). Never before had the United States been a venue for the Congress.

Wichman, National Tropical Botanical Garden President and CEO, curator of the 989-acre Limahuli Preserve on Kauai, not only served on the Host and Program Committees of the WCC, but was largely responsible for the idea of holding the event in Hawaii, where threats to unique eco-systems and biodiversity are on center stage.  Back in 2008, after attending the Barcelona WCC, Maui kalo farmer and educator Penny Levin suggested that the only way to get suitable attention and funding for local conservation needs would be to bring an event of this stature to Hawaii. Dr. Christopher Dunn, then-director of Lyon Arboretum, and Wichman agreed, and began an eight-year odyssey of making the dream a reality.

By all accounts, the 2016 IUCN-WCC, held Sept. 1-10 at Honolulu’s Hawaii Convention Center, was an unprecedented success. More that 10,000 people attended, from more than 190 nations. The extravaganza showcased Hawaii, Pacific and global eco-issues and challenges with dozens of displays, presentations, forums and discussions over the first five days. Then the Congress shifted gears, with five days of deliberations and voting on 85 proposals, from closing domestic markets for elephant ivory trade to securing our future by developing a post-2020 strategy.

A Who’s Who list of conservation luminaries and leaders highlighted the event–Jane Goodall, Sylvia Earle, Jean Michel Cousteau, E.O. Wilson and more—with President Barack Obama a late no-show after a brief welcome to the Pacific Island Conference of Leaders in a small, private event at the UH East-West Center on Manoa on the eve of the WCC. Expected to address the general assembly at an opening reception at Neal Blaisdell Center the next morning, Obama instead flew to Midway, in the center of the Paphanaumokuakea Marine National Monument (PMNM) that he expanded just a week earlier by presidential order, making it the world’s largest marine protected area.

Read the full story at Mauitime

Ocean Warming Is Already Affecting Arctic Fish And Birds

September 13, 2016 — Up until a few years ago, mackerel were unknown in Greenland’s cold waters. The small oily fish typically spawned west of the British Isles and then migrated toward the northeast along the Norwegian current to feed for the summer. But in 2007, they began to show up in large numbers in the Irminger Current around Iceland. On the ocean highway, where they once turned right, they now turned left.

By 2011, the mackerel had found their way into Greenlandic waters, prompting the launch of a new fishery. Three years later, the mackerel fishery made up 23 percent of Greenland’s export earning, an “extreme example of how climate change can impact the economy of an entire nation,” Teunis Jansen, a researcher at the Technical University of Denmark, said in a release.

The mackerel aren’t the only species being affected by warmer oceans. Soaring temperatures have pushed entire groups of species toward the poles, caused increases in disease in plants and animals and changed weather patterns, according to a report launched this week by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Marine species are moving northward at a rate roughly five times faster than the migration of land animals.

The report, released during the IUCN World Conservation Congress in Hawaii, highlights the impacts of ocean warming on marine life, from microorganisms to mammals. Eighty scientists from a dozen countries worked on the report, considered to be the most comprehensive collection of research on the planet’s warming oceans.

Truly Staggering

“We were astounded by the scale and extent of ocean warming effects on entire ecosystems made clear by this report,” said Dan Laffoley, an IUCN marine adviser and one of the report’s lead authors.

The world’s oceans have acted as a buffer against climate change. A “staggering 93 percent” of the heat produced by human activities has been absorbed by the world’s oceans, Laffoley said. If the heat had entered the atmosphere instead of the oceans, the Earth would have warmed not by the 1C (1.8F) we have already experienced, but by 36C (64.8F). “Up to now, the ocean has shielded us from the worst impacts of climate change,” the report’s authors write.

Read the full story at the Huffington Post

Obama In Honolulu: ‘No Nation Is Immune To A Changing Climate’

September 1, 2016 — Climate change and cooperation emerged as key themes Wednesday when President Barack Obama addressed Pacific Island government leaders and others at the East-West Center in Honolulu.

“No nation, not even one as powerful as the United States, is immune to a changing climate,” he said, adding that “there’s no conflict between a healthy economy and a healthy planet.”

“While some members of the U.S. Congress still seem to be debating whether climate change is real or not, you are planning for new places for your people to live,” Obama said. “Crops are withering in the Marshall Islands. Kiribati bought land in another country because theirs may someday be submerged. High seas forced villagers from their homes in Fiji.”

The private speech before the Pacific Islands Conference of Leaders, a group of 20 government officials chaired by Papua New Guinea Prime Minister Peter O’Neill, came on the eve of the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s 10-day event in Honolulu.

More than 9,000 people from 190 countries are coming to what’s been dubbed the “Olympics of Conservation.” It’s the first time that the IUCN’s World Conservation Congress, created in 1948, will meet in the United States — something Obama highlighted in his speech.

Environmental advocates had wanted Obama to speak at the opening ceremony Thursday morning at Blaisdell Center, hoping that’s where he would announce the fourfold expansion of Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument around the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands.

Instead, the president signed the proclamation for the expansion last week.

Read the full story at the Honolulu Civil Beat

Hawaii set to host world’s largest conservation meeting

August 31, 2016 — Some 8,000 heads of state, policymakers and environmentalists convene in Hawaii this week for the world’s largest gathering aimed at forging a path forward on the planet’s toughest conservation problems.

US President Barack Obama is expected to be among the world leaders in Honolulu as the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) opens its World Conservation Congress, held every four years in a different location around the globe.

This year, the conference theme of “Planet at the Crossroads” is aimed at exposing the plight of island nations that are at risk of disappearing in the coming decades due to rising seas.

It is the first major environmental meeting of global leaders since the Paris climate talks last year.

Read the full story at Phys.org

New York governor sparks anger after killing threatened shark

August 29, 2016 –The New York state governor, Andrew Cuomo, and his news anchor brother Chris have been criticised by conservationists and constituents after posing beside a threatened shark they killed on a fishing trip.

The governor tweeted two photos of himself and friends standing next to the bloodied shark as it hung from a marina-side gantry.

“Today’s catch: A 154.5-lb [70kg] Thresher shark off the south shore of Long Island,” Cuomo tweeted.

All three species of thresher shark are listed as vulnerable by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) because of their declining populations. Fishing for them is regulated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration but it is not illegal.

Despite its legality, the UN’s patron of the oceans, Lewis Pugh, said the killing and subsequent photos were “abhorrent” and worked against those trying to conserve dwindling shark numbers.

“The environment is the primary issue on the global agenda, so it is extraordinary that a senior politician could be so ignorant about it,” he said.

Read the full story at The Guardian