Saving Seafood

COVID-19 Leaves Fisheries Observers in the Dark

October 5, 2020 — The COVID-19 pandemic does not appear to have hindered the distant-water fleets of China and other major fishing nations, but it has largely sidelined the fishery observers and port officials who monitor illegal fishing.

“In most of the South Pacific, fishery inspectors cannot come onboard the vessel to do inspections before authorising” the transfer of catch, known as transshipment, says Francisco Blaha, a New Zealand-based fisheries adviser.

The presence of independent observers on trawlers is a frontline deterrent to illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing. A 2016 study found that a third of the world’s fish catch is not reported.

“The absence of observers will bring a level of uncertainly on reporting” catch, adds Blaha. “The biggest issue we have in the South Pacific is misreporting and underreporting by the licensed fleet.”

This absence comes as the World Trade Organisation (WTO) resumes negotiations in Geneva this month in the latest attempt to reach a consensus on a long-delayed agreement to eliminate harmful subsidies. These promote the IUU and over-fishing that is decimating global fish stocks.

Read the full story at The Maritime Executive

New Zealand introduces plan to put camera aboard all its fishing vessels

September 8, 2020 — New Zealand’s government last week announced plans to put cameras on board 345 fishing vessels, a plan that will cost more than NZD 40 million (USD 27 million, EUR 23 million).

In a press statement, New Zealand Fisheries Minister Stuart Nash said the introduction of on-board cameras will be across the nation’s inshore fishing fleet. He said the government will provide at least a portion of the funding required to install and operate the cameras, but “the precise amount will depend on the business case put together by officials for Cabinet sign-off..”

Read the full story at Seafood Source

COVID-19 might be able to travel on food, preliminary study results indicate

August 27, 2020 — A new study exploring the potential that COVID-19 can linger on food, including frozen seafood, draws connections between recent outbreaks of the disease in China, Vietnam, and New Zealand.

The study, “Seeding of outbreaks of COVID-19 by contaminated fresh and frozen food,” was filed on preprint server BioRxiv on 17 August. BioRxiv publishes preliminary findings that have not been scrutinized by peer review.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Ōra King salmon likened in luxury to Wagyu beef in recent Bloomberg report

September 18, 2019 — Nelson, New Zealand-based company New Zealand King Salmon Co. recently had its brand of net-pen raised king salmon, Ōra King, likened to a luxury item celebrated by chefs the world over – Wagyu beef.

A profile published by media outlet Bloomberg on 13 September declared Ōra King as the “Wagyu beef of the seafood world,” noting the fish’s “strikingly marbled meat” as well as its “sumptuous melt-in-your-mouth texture.”

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Scientists get peek into how some fish change sex as adults

July 10, 2019 — If in the beginning there was male and female, fish seem to have forgotten the memo.

For nearly 500 fish species, including the clownfish in “Finding Nemo,” the great divide between sexes is more like a murky line: If circumstances call for it, the fish can swap their sex, with females turning into males in some species and males turning into females in others.

People think of sex as being fixed, said biologist Erica Todd from the University of Otago in New Zealand, “but there are so many fish that can push it in the other direction.”

Scientists have known for decades about the sex trades, but they’ve had limited understanding of how the exchange happens. In a study published Wednesday in Science Advances, Todd and her colleagues detail the molecular events behind this ability, as well as what keeps mammals stuck as one sex or another.

The researchers looked at the bluehead wrasse, a reef fish that swims in small groups of a dominant blue-headed male and a posse of smaller yellow females. Normally the male and females stay as they are, feeding together and occasionally mating. But if a predator happens to snatch up the lead male, the dominant female in the group will become a male.

“The sex change in this species is remarkable because it’s so quick,” Todd said. It takes only minutes to a few hours for the female’s behavior to become more territorial and aggressive like a male. In a few days, she courts other females. And after eight to 10 days, she’s fully transitioned to a male.

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

Maine can have both environmental stewardship and aquaculture innovation

March 11, 2019 — There is a 90 percent deficit in fresh seafood trade in the U.S. A large amount of the fresh salmon consumed in the U.S. is flown in from Europe, Chile, and New Zealand, leaving a considerable carbon footprint. Along with an expected 7 to 8 percent annual growth in seafood consumption, there is a strong incentive for creating new, sustainable food systems in the U.S.

While the demand-supply gap keeps growing, there is no growth in sight from wild catch fisheries or net pen operations. Thus, solutions must take a new approach to fish farming and be sustainable. This is where local, land-based aquaculture comes into the picture.

Nordic Aquafarms was started in Norway with a mission to create a more environmentally sustainable way of producing fish — a solution for the future. Nordic Aquafarms is an international front-runner in the land-based fish farming industry. Land-based facilities are indoor production facilities where fish are raised to harvest size in a series of independent tank systems. It is not possible for the fish to escape from our facility, while other potentially harmful effects on wild salmon populations are eliminated.

Read the full story at Bangor Daily News

More than half of New Zealand’s seafood catch now MSC-certified

May 17, 2018 — New Zealand’s seafood industry celebrated the country’s inaugural Sustainable Seafood Day with the announcement that more than half of the country’s total seafood production is now certified to the Marine Stewardship Council’s (MSC) sustainability standard.

Leaders from New Zealand’s seafood industry, including New Zealand Fisheries Minister Stuart Nash, Deepwater Group CEO George Clement, Sanford CEO Volker Kuntzsch, MSC Oceania Program Director Anne Gabriel, and NIWA Principal Scientist Matt Dunn, offered their insights on the sustainable seafood movement at a celebratory event to mark the occasion.

“MSC certification provides a tangible and credible way for consumers to purchase sustainable seafood,” Clement said.

Around 70 percent of New Zealand’s deepwater catch is certified, compared to a global rate of 12 percent, Clement said.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

 

A whale of a heart: Life-size model of a blue whale heart arrives at New Bedford Whaling Museum

May 4, 2018 — NEW BEDFORD, Mass. — A life-size model of a blue whale heart arrived at the New Bedford Whaling Museum on Thursday, all the way from New Zealand.

Visitors are welcome to crawl inside the heart, which has four chambers and is the size of a Volkswagen Beetle.

“It’s pretty spectacular,” Chief Curator Christina Connett said.

The heart is the first major element in a complete redesign of the Jacobs Family Gallery and other spaces for an exhibit titled Whales Today, which focuses on ecology and conservation. Other elements to come include a model of a whale’s head with baleen, plus life-size silhouettes of whale flukes.

The museum staff had waited for days to hear that the heart had cleared customs. Finally it was ready, and it arrived at 8:05 a.m. in a shipping container trucked from Elizabeth, New Jersey.

Read the full story at the New Bedford Standard-Times

 

New Zealand Moves to Compensate Slave-Like Fishermen

March 12, 2018 — New Zealand lawyer Karen Harding has secured the first stage of review of existing New Zealand legislation to improve the working conditions of fishermen.

In particular, the move has given a lifeline to a group of Indonesian fishermen seeking compensation against their former South Korean employers for unpaid wages and slave-like treatment. The men reportedly worked up to 24 hour shifts with few breaks. They were forced to live in cockroach-riddled spaces, sleep in wet bedding and eat flea-ridden food, reports Radio New Zealand.

The Supreme Court has ruled that the men can claim proceeds from the sale of vessels seized by the government. The issues of the case required the Supreme Court to consider the relationship between the provisions of two separate pieces of legislation, the Fisheries Act and the Admiralty Act.

Harding has worked on the men’s case for several years without payment. “They were promised what were said to be good jobs, to come to New Zealand on work permits to work on these Korean fishing vessels. They came and they got raped, they got abused, they got molested, they had insects in their food, their rooms were full of cockroaches and mice.

Read the full story at the Maritime Executive

 

What Will It Take for Americans to Eat Genetically Engineered Salmon?

February 27, 2018 — One day in 1992, a technology entrepreneur sat down for a meeting with a pair of biologists who were studying the genes of fish. The scientists, Hew Choy Leong and Garth Fletcher, were working on a method of purifying “antifreeze proteins” that would help Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar) survive so-called super-chill events in the North Atlantic. Normally these salmon migrate out of the subzero, ice-laden seawater of the far North Atlantic to overwinter in less-frigid waters. Increasingly, though, such fish were being farmed, penned year-round in offshore cages, in near-Arctic waters to which they were not adapted. Fish farmers were looking for a way to keep the fish alive through the winter, and the antifreeze protein seemed like a possible solution.

As the meeting drew to a close, Fletcher and Hew showed Elliot Entis, the entrepreneur, a photo of two fish of equal age. One dwarfed the other. “I sat back down,” Entis recalled recently.

Fletcher and Hew, it turned out, had not just been putting antifreeze proteins into Atlantic salmon. They had also figured out a way to add a growth hormone from Chinook salmon (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha), plus a fragment of DNA from the ocean pout (Zoarces americanus), an eellike creature that inhabits the chilly depths off the coast of New England and eastern Canada. This genetic code acts like an “on” switch to activate the growth hormone. The result was a genetically engineered super-fish that grew nearly twice as fast, on less food, than conventional salmon.

Those salmon, grown and marketed by a company called AquaBounty Technologies that was founded by Entis, could be coming to U.S. grocery stores next year. And they could offer a way out of the deadly spiral of overfishing that is decimating wild-fish stocks.

Read the full story at The Atlantic