Saving Seafood

This New App Uses AI To Grade Tuna Freshness

July 10, 2020 — Sushi is only as good as the fish wrapped inside its barrel of rice and seaweed. If the tuna, yellowtail, or salmon isn’t fresh, it not only looks gross, but renders the whole roll underwhelming in flavor and texture.

To keep things from getting fishy, a Japanese company has developed a new mobile app that uses artificial intelligence to grade the freshness of cuts of tuna on sight. Aptly named Tuna Scope, the system uses thousands of cross-sectional images of tuna tails as training data to learn what good quality tuna looks like.

According to the Tuna Scope website, trained fishmongers use the tuna tail as a “road map” detailing the fish’s flavor, texture, freshness, and overall excellence. Traditionally, master tuna merchants look at things like color and sheen, firmness, and the layering of fat to set fish prices. The silkier the meat looks, the better it probably tastes.

“The goal behind the development of this system was to pass down skills in the field of tuna evaluation, an area with a serious shortage of successors,” Dentsu, the Tokyo-based digital marketing company that led development of the app, said in a press release.

Read the full story at Popular Mechanics

Toyosu sales figures reveal crippling effect of COVID-19 on Japan’s seafood market

May 4, 2020 — Tokyo’s Toyosu Market is experiencing a drastic financial fallout as Japan reels from the economic shock of COVID-19.

From March to April, both the volume of seafood Japan’s largest seafood market handled and the prices it received had nosedived. But the crash has been uneven, reflecting a shift by Japanese consumers from eating out to cooking at home. Sales of luxury items like tuna have dropped significantly, while sales of fish more commonly cooked inside the home in Japan, such as salmon and hamachi, have not seen a significant falloff.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Coronavirus Traps Fishing Crew of Japanese Long-Distance Tuna Vessels

March 30, 2020 — The global spread of the novel coronavirus is beginning to significantly affect the activity of pelagic tuna fisheries, according to the Suisan Keizai Shimbun, a Japanese fisheries industry newspaper. The number of countries that regulate boarding and disembarking of crewmembers at major supply ports overseas has increased. In the current situation, where boats are moored at overseas ports, crewmembers are unable to return to Japan by air. Some vessels are having trouble deciding whether to hurry to return to Japan or continue fishing until the initially planned fishing season and wait for a turnaround of the virus situation.

Restrictions on immigration have been gaining momentum since World Health Organization Director-General Tedros said on March 11 that the new coronavirus was a pandemic. Countries with essential ports for the Japanese long-distance fleet, such as Las Palmas, Spain, and Cape Town, South Africa, have also begun banning foreign crew members from getting on and off and entering the countries.

Read the full story at Seafood News

COVID-19 hits seafood markets in Australia, Japan, US

March 17, 2020 — The full financial effects of the coronavirus outbreak are starting to become apparent in seafood markets across the globe, reports American Shipper.

In Australia, for instance, a fisheries and aquaculture sector very dependent on Chinese seafood demand is likely to see a decline in earnings of $389 million due to the excess product that traders are unable to send to the country.

It’s a similar issue in Canada, where the previously booming trade of live Atlantic lobsters to China has ground to a halt after both China and other nearby Asian countries stopped accepting deliveries from seafood shipping companies.

Likewise, the trade of baby eels, or elvers, from Maine in the US to China is also at a standstill — bad news for a $168m industry nearly entirely dependent on the trade route for its custom.

Read the full story at Undercurrent News

Maine to let new people into lucrative baby eel fishing biz

January 16, 2020 — The state of Maine is allowing nine new people to participate in the fishing industry that harvests baby eels, which are among the most valuable natural resources in the state.

Baby eels, called elvers, are harvested so they can be used as seed stock by Asian aquaculture companies. They are typically eventually used in Japanese food. The eels were worth more than $2,300 per pound in Maine in 2018.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at The Washington Times

‘Tuna King’ buys 608-pound fish for $1.8 million at Sunday auction in Japan

January 7, 2020 — One fish, two fish, red fish… million-dollar tuna fish.

Japanese businessman Kiyoshi Kimura, who has dubbed himself the “Tuna King,” purchased a 608-pound fish for $1.8 million at a Sunday auction.

The blue fin fetched the second-highest price in history at auction Sunday, Japanese Broadcasting Corporation NHK reported.

Caught in Aomori, a political region of Japan, the giant fish sold for 193 million yen — equivalent to nearly $1.8 million.

“Yes, this is expensive, isn’t it? I want our customers to eat very tasty ones this year, too,” Kimura said after the auction, as reported by Agence France-Presse.

Read the full story at the New York Daily News

Bigeye tuna get ‘modest’ reprieve as fishing nations cut quotas

November 27, 2019 — The world’s major fishing nations have agreed “modest” quota cuts for the under-pressure Atlantic Bigeye tuna but critics say more should be done to protect an important food resource.

Scientists warn that unless the catch is reduced, stocks of Thunnus obesus—especially prized for sashimi in Japan and canned worldwide—could collapse within years.

A scientific report prepared for last year’s failed meeting of the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT) showed numbers had plummeted to less than 20 percent of historic levels.

This is only about half what is needed to support a “maximum sustainable yield”—the largest catch that can be taken without compromising the long-term stability of a species.

Going into the meeting in Majorca, Spain, ICCAT had a headline  of 65,000 tonnes, allocated to the seven groups, including Japan and the EU, with the largest catch.

When smaller members were included, this rose to around 77,000 tonnes, pushing the Bigeye further into the , according to NGOs.

Read the full story at PHYS.org

The climate chain reaction that threatens the heart of the Pacific

November 13, 2019 — Lined up along the side of their boat, the fishermen hauled a huge, heavy net up from swelling waves. At first, a few small jellyfish emerged, then a piece of plastic. Then net, and more net. Finally, all the way at the bottom: a small thrashing mass of silvery salmon.

It was just after dawn at the height of the autumn fishing season, but something was wrong.

“When are the fish coming?” boat captain Teruhiko Miura asked himself.

The salmon catch is collapsing off Japan’s northern coast, plummeting by about 70 percent in the past 15 years. The disappearance of the fish coincides with another striking development: the loss of a unique blanket of sea ice that dips far below the Arctic to reach this shore.

The twin impacts — less ice, fewer salmon — are the products of rapid warming in the Sea of Okhotsk, wedged between Siberia and Japan. The area has warmed in some places by as much as 3 degrees Celsius since preindustrial times, making it one of the fastest-warming spots in the world, according to a Washington Post analysis of data from the nonprofit organization Berkeley Earth.

Read the full story at The Washington Post

Controversial Pesticides Are Suspected Of Starving Fish

November 4, 2019 — There’s new evidence that a widely used family of pesticides called neonicotinoids, already controversial because they can be harmful to pollinators, could be risky for insects and fish that live in water, too.

The evidence comes from Lake Shinji, which lies near Japan’s coast, next to the Sea of Japan.

Masumi Yamamuro, a scientist with the Geological Survey of Japan, says the lake is famous for its views of the setting sun. “It’s amazingly beautiful,” she says.

Lake Shinji was also the site of thriving fisheries. People harvested clams, and eels, and small fish called smelts. But, Yamamuro says, about a decade ago, people noticed that fish populations had declined drastically. “I was asked to investigate the cause of this decrease,” she says.

It was a puzzle. Yamamuro says the decline in fish populations did not seem to coincide with anything that people were keeping track of, like the lake’s salinity, or levels of pollution.

But she noticed something curious. One kind of fish in the lake was doing fine. This one had a more diverse diet; it could eat algae, as well as tiny insects in the water. The eels and the smelts that were dying off relied on insects and crustaceans for food. And that food source was vanishing.

Read the full story at New England Public Radio

Report urges lenders to price sustainability risks into seafood industry capital costs

October 21, 2019 — A new report from the nonprofit Planet Tracker is urging banks and investors to price the hidden risk of unsustainable operations by Japanese seafood companies into their lending decisions.

Planet Tracker is a project of Investor Watch, a nonprofit company with the goal of encouraging “impact investing,” or aligning capital markets with social and ecological sustainability. Mark Campanale, a co-founder of Investor Watch, formerly worked for asset management companies and was involved in the creation of several responsible investment funds. He also provided input to the current report.

Read the full story at Seafood Source