Saving Seafood

L.A. fires wreaked havoc on the land. Scientists are racing to learn what they’ve done to the sea

January 30, 2025 — The Reuben Lasker was about four miles off the coast of Manhattan Beach when ash began to rain upon the sea — first in delicate flurries, then in noxious clouds.

The fisheries research vessel had set sail days earlier for a coastal survey. It was supposed to be a routine voyage, the kind that the California Cooperative Oceanic Fisheries Investigations (CalCOFI) program embarks upon four times a year as part of the world’s longest-running marine ecosystem monitoring effort.

But when the Palisades and Eaton fires broke out, scientists aboard the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration ship inadvertently became the first investigators on the scene of a brewing disaster that could upend life underwater.

The smoke that has choked Los Angeles, the debris piled up along decimated streets, the charred and toxic remnants of thousands of destroyed homes, businesses, cars and electronics — nearly all of it, eventually, will come to rest in the ocean.

There is no precedent for how an urban fire of this magnitude could change the ecosystem that countless species, including our own, rely on for food and sustenance.

Read the full article at Los Angeles Times

 

CALIFORNIA: Los Angeles seafood industry takes hit after California fires destroy homes and businesses

January 13, 2025 — The seafood industry in Los Angeles, California, U.S.A., is stepping up to help victims of devastating wildfires after multiple fast-moving blazes destroyed homes, restaurants, and grocery stores – including some long-running seafood establishments.

Malibu, California-based seafood eatery Reel Inn, which has been open for more than 40 years in Topanga State Park, was completely destroyed, according to the Los Angeles Times. Owners Andy and Teddy Leonard were getting ready to renegotiate the restaurant’s lease with state officials, and now, they worry “they won’t let us rebuild,” they told the newspaper.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

Sushi mislabeling rates have fallen 65 percent across Los Angeles, study finds

November 4, 2024 — Sushi mislabeling appears to be trending downward in Los Angeles, California, U.S.A., according to recent findings from a decade-long Loyola Marymount University (LMU) study.

The study, which was published in the journal Food Control, found a 65 percent drop in mislabeling rates among restaurants participating in the Los Angeles Seafood Monitoring Project, with which LMU is a partner.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

Biden administration addressing port congestion woes

October 13, 2021 — U.S. President Joe Biden is meeting with public and private industry leaders on Wednesday, 13 October, with the goal of using federal action to ease shipping delays before the end-of-year holiday season.

The White House announced prior to the meeting a plan that will move the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, California – which have faced significant congestion through the past two months – toward 24/7 operations. The two ports account for approximately 40 percent of the shipping volume entering the United States, but had more than 80 vessels waiting their turn to unload as of 12 October, according to the Marine Exchange of Southern California.

Read the full story at SeafoodSource

 

High material, transportation costs continue to impact US seafood industry

September 24, 2021 — The latest in a long line of transportation snags affecting the seafood industry is gridlock at ports in the U.S. state of California, which has created supply chain woes for importers of products from China and other major seafood-supplying nations.

A record-breaking 73 ships were waiting at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach on 20 September, according to the Marine Exchange of Southern California, per The Wall Street Journal, with the average wait time for ships to get into Los Angeles extending out to 8.5 days, also a record.

Read the full story at SeafoodSource

 

What’s best weapon for battling species invading California waters? Data

August 21, 2017 — There’s an invasion plaguing the coastal waters of Southern California.

Waves of tiny interlopers spark havoc at fisheries, clog municipal water pipes and frustrate boaters who must dislodge buckets of sea crud.

They’ve altered our coastal regions’ ecosystems, endangered native fish and birthed such nasty problems as “swimmer’s itch.”

Accelerated in recent decades by international trade, invasive sea creatures have hitchhiked here in and alongside massive cargo vessels from around the globe.

Local officials admit they often don’t know enough about these oft-destructive invaders to halt their environmental takeovers or truly know to what extent the strategies they’ve launched against them are actually working.

But experts from such prestigious organizations as the Smithsonian Environment Research Center have vowed to gather the intelligence needed to rescue native species by studying the incoming hordes, comparing the myriad areas they’ve infiltrated and assessing whether anti-invasive methods and regulations already in place are effective.

“We still don’t know enough about these species,” said Brianna Tracy, a research biologist for the center, which has launched four years of monitoring of the waters along the nation’s largest seaport, the twin Long Beach and Los Angeles cargo complexes.

Read the full story at the Press-Telegram

Environmental group sues after Trump administration scraps effort to protect West Coast sea animals

July 14, 2017 — An environmental group has filed a federal lawsuit challenging the Trump administration’s withdrawal of proposed limits on the number of endangered whales, dolphins and sea turtles that can be killed or injured by sword-fishing nets on the West Coast.

Oceana Inc., which lodged the case late Wednesday in Los Angeles, alleges that the government violated required procedures for rescinding the proposed caps that had been recommended in 2015 by the federal Pacific Fishery Management Council.

Named as defendants in the U.S. District Court case are Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Marine Fisheries Service.

“The withdrawal of this important protection for whales, sea turtles, and other species is plainly illegal,” said Mariel Combs, Oceana’s attorney. “The law requires the fisheries service to respect the fishery management council’s expertise in managing fisheries.”

Read the full story at the Los Angeles Times

Something’s fishy in LA’s sushi supply, study says

January 12, 2017 — Almost half of the fish ordered at Los Angeles sushi restaurants and bought at high-end grocery stores is mislabeled, with some of the offerings coming from endangered species, according to a study by researchers at UCLA and Loyola Marymount University.

The study, whose findings were announced Wednesday, checked the DNA of fish ordered at 26 L.A. sushi restaurants from 2012 through 2015 and found that 47 percent of the sushi was mislabeled.

“The good news is that sushi represented as tuna was almost always tuna. Salmon was mislabeled only about 1 in 10 times. But out of 43 orders of halibut and 32 orders of red snapper, DNA tests showed the researchers were always served a different kind of fish,” stated a UCLA press release. “A one-year sampling of high-end grocery stores found similar mislabeling rates, suggesting the bait-and-switch may occur earlier in the supply chain than the point of sale to consumers.”

Paul Barber, a UCLA professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and senior author of the study that appeared Wednesday in the journal Conservation Biology, said the apparent fraud goes beyond having the wrong fish on your plate; it also undermines environmental regulations limiting overfishing, introduces unexpected health risks and interferes with consumers’ decisions.

“Half of what we’re buying isn’t what we think it is,” Barber said. “Fish fraud could be accidental, but I suspect that in some cases the mislabeling is very much intentional, though it’s hard to know where in the supply chain it begins. I suspected we would find some mislabeling, but I didn’t think it would be as high as we found in some species.”

Read the full story at KPCC

Fishers balk at proposal to designate Pacific Ocean national monuments

July 8, 2016 — West Coast fishers, including those that supply Los Angeles and Long Beach with local seafood, are incensed at a “secret” proposal from environmentalists asking President Barack Obama to create new national monuments in the Pacific Ocean.

Dozens of California fishing businesses and their representatives signed a letter this week asking Obama to ignore suggestions to block fishing in open-ocean areas rich with sea life by designating them as offshore marine monuments.

Environmental groups made the proposal in a “secret effort” to lobby the president to declare that many Pacific Ocean seamounts, ridges and banks are national landmarks, according to the letter.

The five-page environmental proposal, “The Case for Protecting California’s Seamounts, Ridges and Banks,” argues that these parts of the ocean should be preserved for scientific research. Seamounts and ridges are craggy underwater mountains, and banks are shallow areas near deep ocean drop-offs.

“These special places are home to thousand-year-old corals thriving against all odds in the dark, cold depths,” the proposal states. “And they attract a remarkable variety of migratory predators such as sharks, tuna, billfishes, seabirds, and endangered sea turtles, which congregate to fuel up on the food produced by nutrient-rich upwelling currents.”

Read the full story in the Daily Breeze