Saving Seafood

NOAA defends U.S. Fisheries

October 17, 2017 — This week, NOAA Fisheries Assistant Administrator, Chris Oliver, sent a letter to the editor of Marine Policy that does not mince words. In response to a new report on IUU fishing, Mr. Oliver asks the editor, “to publish a retraction, and to ensure future articles undergo adequate review to avoid publication of misleading information.”

The article in question, “Estimates of illegal and unreported seafood imports to Japan,” claims a portion of IUU seafood coming to Japan include salmon, crab, and Alaska pollock from the United States. However, these three species in particular are considered among the best managed and most closely monitored in the world. (Not to mention, they’re healthy).

A flawed methodology

Mr. Oliver calls the allegations absent of any transparency regarding the data sources and methodology used by the authors to come up with these claims. The letter goes into more detail about data and methodology concerns and then provides ample information about the robust management of U.S. Alaska pollock, salmon, and crab fisheries.

Read the full story at the National Fisheries Institute

Read the letter from Chris Oliver to Marine Policy at NOAA

Japanese Animals Are Still Washing Up in America After The 2011 Tsunami

Plastics and metals have made it much easier for invasive species to raft across oceans.

September 29, 2017 — On March 11, 2011, an unprecedentedly powerful earthquake struck the Tōhoku region of Japan. It destroyed hundreds of thousands of buildings, wrecked the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, created a tsunami that reached 40 meters in height, and shifted the entire planet a few inches on its axis. But among these catastrophic consequences, there were also subtler ones. For example, the tsunami inundated a small blue-and-white fishing boat called the Sai-shou-maru, ripping it from its moorings and casting it out to sea.

The boat drifted eastward through the Pacific, never capsizing. Then, on March 22, 2013, a couple weeks after the two-year anniversary of the quake, it washed ashore on Long Beach, Washington. Its hull was encrusted with seaweed and barnacles, and one of its compartments was full of water. And living in that water were five striped beakfish. The fish were youngsters, just four inches long. They had probably been swept into the boat as larvae, and spent their entire lives growing up within this ersatz aquarium. For two years, the boat was their entire world.

Four of those fish were euthanized by the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, but the fifth—now known as the “tsunami fish” was relocated to Oregon’s Seaside Aquarium. Its story astonished John Chapman, an ecologist at Oregon State University who studies aquatic invasive species. Somehow, this coastal species had endured a two-year, 4,000-mile voyage across the open ocean, in the tiniest of living spaces. “We said this couldn’t happen,” Chapman told OregonLive. “And nature is like: Oh yes it can.”

Of late, nature has been saying that to Chapman a lot.

In the last five years, he and his colleagues have documented 634 pieces of debris that were swept away by the Tōhoku tsunami and eventually washed up on the coasts of North America. And it hasn’t stopped coming yet. Between them, these bits of ocean-hopping junk carried 289 species that are typically found along Japanese coasts—a vast horde of sponges, sea stars, sea anemones, mussels, limpets, barnacles, and fish.

Read the full story at The Atlantic

Study negates concerns regarding radioactivity in migratory seafood

September 5, 2017 — When the Fukushima power plant released large quantities of radioactive materials into nearby coastal waters following Japan’s massive 2011 earthquake and tsunami, it raised concerns as to whether eating contaminated seafood might impair human health—not just locally but across the Pacific.

A new study by an international research team shows that those concerns can now be laid to rest, at least for consumption of meat from migratory marine predators such as tuna, swordfish, and sharks.

The team focused on cesium, a silvery metal with a large number of radioactive isotopes. Two of these, 134Cs and 137Cs, form when uranium fuel breaks down in nuclear reactors. The cesium isotopes are of particular concern because they were discharged in large quantities following the disaster, exhibit relatively long half-lives (2.1 and 30 years respectively), and tend to accumulate in the muscle tissues that people like to eat.

However, the team’s sampling of tissues from predatory fishes and other large vertebrates collected across the northern Pacific between 2012 and 2015 revealed no detectable levels of 134Cs, and 137Cs concentrations that were generally consistent with background levels from aboveground nuclear testing during the 1940s and 50s. They collected the animals from waters near Japan, Hawaii, and California.

Read the full story at Phys.org

Tuna-fishing nations agree on plan to replenish severely depleted Pacific bluefin stocks

September 1, 2017 — TOKYO — The world’s Pacific bluefin tuna won something of a reprieve Friday, when tuna-fishing countries reached an agreement to gradually rebuild severely depleted stocks while still allowing nations such as Japan to catch and consume the delicacy.

Japan — by far the world’s biggest consumer of bluefin, eating about 80 percent of the global haul in the $42 billion tuna industry — had been resisting new rules, while conservationists have warned about the commercial extinction of bluefin in the Pacific Ocean.

Proponents of limits hailed the deal as a compromise that everyone could live with.

“It’s definitely a good first step towards the recovery of the species,” said James Gibbon, global tuna conservation officer at the Pew Charitable Trusts. “But it is only the first step. There are a lot of commitments that the countries agreed to, and we need to make sure they stick to them.”

At the week-long meeting in Busan, South Korea, the two bodies charged with shared management of Pacific bluefin — the northern committee of the Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission and the Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission — hammered out a plan to try to put the fish back on a path to sustainability. Countries represented at the meeting included the United States, Canada, China, South Korea and Japan.

The Pacific bluefin population has been depleted by more than 97 percent from its historic high, because of overfishing.

Read the full story at the Washington Post

Sea Shepherd Activists Halt Pursuit of Japanese Whalers

August 30, 2017 — The environmentalist group Sea Shepherd has called off its annual pursuit of Japanese whaling ships in the Southern Ocean, according to the group’s founder, who said it cannot keep up with Japan’s surveillance technology.

“What we discovered is that Japan is now employing military surveillance to watch Sea Shepherd ship movements in real time by satellite,” the group’s founder, Paul Watson, said in a statement. “If they know where our ships are at any given moment, they can easily avoid us.”

Sea Shepherd, a self described “eco-vigilante” group founded in 1977, has spent years patrolling the remote Southern Ocean, investigating and documenting illegal fishing and whaling operations, putting it directly at odds with Japanese vessels. In addition to filming the operations, the group uses confrontational tactics that include shooting water cannon and stink bombs at the Japanese vessels.

Mr. Watson maintains that his group acts within the law. “We never caused a single injury to any person in all of these years,” he said in an interview. “The criminals are quite plain to see.”

Since 2005, Sea Shepherd has patrolled the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary, a protected area where whaling is prohibited. A few nations, including Japan, have special research permits that allow for some whaling.

Read the full story at the New York Times

Japanese scallop village struggling for labor despite profits

August 28, 2017 — A village in the far north of Japan is the nation’s richest thanks to its scallop harvesting industry; however, the operations may be threatened by a lack of labor, reports the Straights Times.

Sarufutsu village boasts some of the highest average incomes of any town in Japan, thanks to the earnings of fishermen working with scallops pulled from the Sea of Okhotsk.

But the new JPY 2.4 billion ($21.9 million) scallop factory is not running at full capacity because it cannot get enough workers for lower-paying but important jobs.

Read the full story at Undercurrent News

Nonprofits ramp up campaign to increase protections for Pacific bluefin tuna

August 25, 2017 — Ahead of an international conference scheduled next week to discuss rebuilding the Pacific bluefin tuna population, several organizations and influential leaders have urged countries to act quickly to stop what they claim is a steep decline in the species’ numbers.

For years, the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch initiative has urged people to avoid the fish because of its low numbers, but the campaign has picked up steam in advance of Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission’s Northern Committee 13th Regular Session in Busan, South Korea, scheduled to begin on Monday, 28 August. Those involved in the week-long talks centered on conservation measures for the Pacific bluefin tuna include the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Japan, with the latter country being the most dominant market for the species.

Among those speaking out included former U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, who said the current situation not only threatens the ecology but the economy as well.

“Unsustainable fishing isn’t just the enemy of conservation, it’s the enemy of fishermen everywhere,” said Kerry in a statement on the aquarium’s blog. “We know we can do better. That is why we should all be invested in the difficult task of turning things around and getting Pacific bluefin tuna on a path to recovery.”

Read the full story at Seafood Source

NOAA: Determination that bluefin aren’t ‘endangered’ unlikely to affect quota setting

August 15, 2017 — US regulators’ recent decision to reject a petition from environmental groups to list Pacific bluefin tuna as an endangered species is unlikely to affect quota levels, which are set by international bodies.

“I don’t envision this domestic Endangered Species Act determination directly implicating the international management of this species,” Chris Yates, the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)’s west coast assistant regional administrator for protected resources said, in response to a question from Undercurrent News.

The US government doesn’t directly determine bluefin fishing rules in the Pacific, having ceded that authority by treaty to Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission (IATTC), of which major bluefin catchers Japan, Mexico, South Korea and Taiwan are also members. The Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission (WCPFC) also manages bluefin stocks in those areas of the ocean.

IATTC, which is under strong pressure from environmental groups to conserve declining bluefin stocks, recently failed to agree to new measures at a meeting earlier this month in Mexico City. But members have agreed to revisit the issue at a future meeting in Busan, South Korea.

NOAA assessment

After a recent review of the stock, NOAA scientists struck a mostly positive tone about the stock’s prospects to recover.

Yates, and Matthew Craig, who recently chaired a NOAA review into the health of bluefin stocks, said that there are roughly 1.6 million individual bluefin in the North Pacific Ocean, with 140,000 bluefin being of reproductive age and size.

Read the full story at Undercurrent News

Tuna won’t be listed as endangered, Trump administration says

August 8, 2017 — Rejecting a petition from environmental groups, the Trump administration announced Monday that it will not list Pacific bluefin tuna — a torpedo-shaped fish that can grow to 1,000 pounds and which sells for $100,000 or more per fish in Japanese sushi markets — as endangered, despite that fact that the animal’s population has fallen 97 percent.

Even with heavy fishing pressure, the steely fish, which swim 6,000 miles between California and Asia, still number about 1.6 million, officials from NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said Monday.

“The Pacific bluefin tuna does not meet the definition of threatened or endangered under the Endangered Species Act; that is, it’s not likely to become extinct either now or in the foreseeable future,” said Chris Yates, assistant regional administrator for protected resources at the NOAA Fisheries West Coast Region in Long Beach.

“The population has been at low levels before and has rebounded,” he added.

Environmental groups, however, were disappointed. They have compared bluefin tuna to elephant tusks or shark fins — products that come from an important, but vulnerable, species and command high prices for status value.

Read the full story at the Mercury News

Nations Will Start Talks to Protect Fish of the High Seas

August 2, 2017 — UNITED NATIONS — More than half of the world’s oceans belong to no one, which often makes their riches ripe for plunder.

Now, countries around the world have taken the first step to protect the precious resources of the high seas. In late July, after two years of talks, diplomats at the United Nations recommended starting treaty negotiations to create marine protected areas in waters beyond national jurisdiction — and in turn, begin the high-stakes diplomatic jostling over how much to protect and how to enforce rules.

“The high seas are the biggest reserve of biodiversity on the planet,” Peter Thomson, the ambassador of Fiji and current president of the United Nations General Assembly, said in an interview after the negotiations. “We can’t continue in an ungoverned way if we are concerned about protecting biodiversity and protecting marine life.”

Without a new international system to regulate all human activity on the high seas, those international waters remain “a pirate zone,” Mr. Thomson said.

Lofty ambitions, though, are likely to collide with hard-knuckled diplomatic bargaining. Some countries resist the creation of a new governing body to regulate the high seas, arguing that existing regional organizations and rules are sufficient. The commercial interests are powerful. Russian and Norwegian vessels go to the high seas for krill fishing; Japanese and Chinese vessels go there for tuna. India and China are exploring the seabed in international waters for valuable minerals. Many countries are loath to adopt new rules that would constrain them.

Read the full story at the New York Times