Saving Seafood

More than 80 percent want new safeguards against seafood fraud and mislabeling

September 28, 2016 — WASHINGTON — A new survey by Oceana finds more than 4 of 5 Americans want new regulations to eliminate seafood fraud and mislabeling of fish in the United States.

The survey found that support for traceability requirements – like documenting how and where various types of fish were caught or farmed – was high among registered Democratic voters – 87 percent and Republicans – 81 percent.

The national survey by Oceana, an international ocean conservation group, queried 1,000 registered voters from September 15-19.

It found 71 percent believe seafood fraud is a problem, 76 percent would pay more to know their seafood products are legally caught and labled correctly, while 88 percent feel it’s important to know the kind of seafood they’re consuming.

Read the full story from McClatchy DC at the Miami Herald

New satellite-based technology aims to crack down on illegal fishing

September 28, 2016 — Commercial fishing in Alaska is a multibillion dollar industry. But every year, billions of dollars are lost to illegal fishing around the world. A new satellite-based surveillance system makes it easier to track illegal fishing. But some fishermen aren’t ready for Big Brother watching their every move.

Worldwide, overfishing is a huge problem. Jacqueline Savitz, vice president of the conservation group Oceana, says populations of big fish, like halibut, have dropped 90 percent. But the fish can rebound when their habitats are protected.

“We actually see fish stocks coming back and getting to levels where they’re sustainable, so we can continue to live off the interest, if you will, and not fish down the principal,” said Savitz. “But we also have a problem with illegal fishing. It’s about a $23 billion industry globally.”

Now, there’s a new tool for people who want to prevent illegal fishing: Global Fishing Watch. It’s a free, web-based, interactive map of the world’s traceable commercial fishing activity, dating back to January 2012.

It’s based off information gathered from vessels’ Automatic Identification Systems (AIS). The boats broadcast  signals including their location, who they are, and where they’re headed.

Read the full story at KTOO

ALEX RILEY: The Shark Fin Ban That Should Be Banned

September 23, 2016 — Every year, fishers haul up to 73 million sharks onto boats across the world’s oceans and trim their fins. In many cases, the rest of the body is thrown overboard to swim without propulsion. And without propulsion, no life-giving water flows over the sharks’ gills. They drown.

This is shark finning, a cruel practice that feeds the demand for the Chinese delicacy of shark fin or fish wing soup. From boat to bowl, it is tasteless.

To curb the death toll [of sharks], the US Congress plans to introduce the Shark Fin Trade Elimination Act of 2016. The bill was originally outlined to Congress by the advocacy organization Oceana* as part of a growing movement to outlaw all shark fins across the US. If passed, to sell or possess shark fins would be a punishable offense. It’s the ultimate protection from being made into soup.

Strange, then, that people who dedicate their lives to protecting sharks are vehemently opposed to the bill.

In a letter to Senator Bill Nelson, Bob Hueter, director of the Center for Shark Research at the Mote Marine Laboratory in Sarasota, Florida, outlines his objections. At best, it’s unnecessary, he says. At worst, it harms rather than helps shark populations.

For one, shark finning is already illegal in the United States (as well as in Canada, Australia, and Europe). Returning to shore with fins that have no corresponding body is like docking straight into a court hearing. According to Lindsay Davidson, a PhD candidate from Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, this fins-attached policy “is the gold standard for ensuring finning is not occurring.”

But fishing for sharks within a set quota is completely legal, at least for now. This allows commercial fishers to sell the meat just like any other fish, as well as the skin, liver oil, and, yes, the fins. It’s not finning, it’s heavily managed fishing; a practice that is sustainable and makes use of the entire shark rather than just its most coveted cuts.

The proposed ban would change that. The meat could still be eaten or sold, but any fins would have to be tossed overboard, thrown into the trash, or used for display or research purposes by a museum, college, or university, to avoid breaking the law. “It’s going in the opposite direction from the goal of any fishery,” says Hueter. That is, to “utilize as much as you can, and throw away as little as you have to.”

Read the full opinion piece at Hakai Magazine

Dalhousie scientists play big role in Leonardo DiCaprio-funded website

September 20, 2016 — Dalhousie University researchers have played an important part in bringing to life a ‘revolutionary’ new website that allows anyone with internet to monitor and track commercial fishing activity around the world, as well as potentially identify illegal fishing.

Unveiled last week, Global Fishing Watch is a joint project between Google, digital mapping non-profit SkyTruth and ocean conservation group Oceana. It’s funded by the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation.

The website allows users to view a world map with more than 35,000 major fishing vessels moving in “near real time,” which is 72 hours from the present time.

Engineers behind Global Fishing Watch collaborated with researchers at Dalhousie University in the process of developing new ways to identify and hone in on fishing vessel activity, said Jacqueline Savitz, vice-president for U.S. and Global Fishing Watch at Oceana.

Global Fishing Watch will also eventually incorporate algorithms developed at Dalhousie, to provide a more complete picture of fishing activity on the high seas.

Read the full story at CBC News

New partnerships increase use of satellite data to curb IUU fishing

September 19th, 2016 — Two announcements this week by technology firms working with the seafood industry will increase the industry’s use of and reliance on satellite data to combat illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing.

Global Fishing Watch (GFW), a partnership between Oceana, SkyTruth and Google providing near real-time satellite tracking, has teamed up with Trace Register, a technology firm that provides traceability solutions to the seafood industry, to offer access to GFW’s data to all Trace Register customers.

“We are excited to announce that we’re extending our food traceability solution and will now link Global Fishing Watch data directly to the seafood that was produced. Harvesters will be able to use GFW data to provide assurances they operate in a legal and responsible manner,” Trace Register CEO Phil Werdal said. “Seafood processors, distributors, retailers, foodservice providers, and ultimately the consumer, can verify their seafood was legally and responsibly produced.”

Jacqueline Savitz, vice president for Global Fishing Watch at Oceana, said the new partnership will also assist consumers to make more informed purchasing decisions.

“Together, Trace Register and Global Fishing Watch will increase transparency in the seafood supply chain, connecting the dots from the point of catch to the point of sale,” she said.

Carrie Brownstein, global seafood quality standards coordinator at Whole Foods Market, called the increasing use of satellite technology in the seafood industry a “revolution.”

Read full story from Seafood Source

Activists Open an Online Window onto the Global Fishing Fleet

September 16, 2016 — Since 2014 a small group of environmentalists has been using satellites to track fishing vessels across the world’s oceans, alerting authorities when boats appear to violate protected marine areas. Now these watchdogs are opening their system to the public with an online mapping tool called Global Fishing Watch—and they are inviting anyone who can to put eyes on rogue fishers. Actor Leonardo DiCaprio, a longtime environmental activist, was set to formally unveil the tool on Thursday at a conference in Washington, D.C., organized by the U.S. State Department.

The project emerged from the Economist World Ocean Summit in 2014, when Paul Woods, chief technology officer of the tech-environmentalist group SkyTruth, met with Jacqueline Savitz, vice president for U.S. Oceans at the nonprofit organization Oceana, and Brian Sullivan, program manager of Google Earth Outreach. All three had been thinking about how to expose the global fishing fleet to public oversight, and in a conversation they sketched out a system to do just that. Within nine months they unveiled a working prototype. Two and a half years and 200 beta testers later, the system is being opened to everyone as a free service.

The hope, according to Savitz, is that governments and activists will use Global Fishing Watch to help improve the enforcement of fishing regulations—by seafood suppliers and customers to verify that fish are being caught sustainably; by fishing companies to demonstrate that they are complying with the rules; and by fisheries scientists to improve their estimates of fishing intensity and the effectiveness of fishery management programs.

The public monitoring system collects ship positions using digital Automatic Identification System (AIS) radio signals sent by large ships—not just fishing vessels but also cargo ships, cruise ships and others—primarily as a collision-avoidance measure. Those signals get picked up by spacecraft and terrestrial antennas operated by the satellite company Orbcomm and others, and accumulate in a database.

SkyTruth teamed up with engineers at Google to develop an algorithm that uses the speed, headings and other aspects of a ship’s motion to identify whether it is fishing or not. Vessels thought to be fishing are then cross-referenced to registries that can reveal their size, ownership and country of origin. As of last week, Woods says, the database includes 63,698 unique fishing vessels spending a total of about 14.5 million days at sea since 2012. On any given day Global Fishing Watch is tracking 10,000 to 20,000 fishing boats. Now nine terabytes and growing, the database tracks the movements of such ships from January 2012 onward. “We are adding about 22 million AIS messages per day,” Woods says. (Ship positions are delayed by 72 hours so as not to compete with Orbcomm’s sale of real-time data.)

Read the full story at Scientific American

How Google is helping to crack down on illegal fishing — from space

September 16, 2016 — Illegal and unreported fishing is a multibillion-dollar business around the globe, and one that has proven notoriously difficult to combat. In part, that’s because it involves a constant stream of renegade fishermen being pursued by countries that have only limited resources to carry out a perpetual cat-and-mouse game on the high seas.

But a new satellite-based surveillance system powered by Google, which will be publicly unveiled Thursday at a global oceans conference at the State Department, aims to help alter that equation. Global Fishing Watch, as it is called, is designed to act as an eye in the sky, constantly scouring the globe in search of those illegally plundering the oceans. The organizations that partnered to develop it, which include the marine-advocacy group Oceana and West Virginia-based nonprofit SkyTruth, say the free platform will help governments, journalists and everyday citizens monitor roughly 35,000 commercial fishing vessels nearly in real time.

“We will be able to see a lot of information about who is fishing where,” said Jacqueline Savitz, vice president for U.S. oceans at Oceana, adding that the platform will help “revolutionize the way the world views commercial fishing.”

The technology uses public broadcast data from the Automatic Identification System (AIS), which uses satellite and land-based receivers to track the movement of ships over time. Not all fishing vessels willingly broadcast their location, of course — particularly those intent on breaking the law — and vessels can switch off their trackers, potentially hindering the usefulness of the new technology. The United States and other countries already require vessels of a certain size to use the locator system, partly as a safety measure to avoid collisions at sea, and more countries are beginning to follow suit. Global Fishing Watch allows users to access that information to track specific vessels over time, going back to 2012.

Savitz said she believes the tool will have an array of uses. Governments could use it to monitor and enforce fishing restrictions in their waters. Journalists and the public can use it to search for suspicious fishing activity, such as vessel that suddenly seems to disappear or one that rarely comes to port, and to make sure officials are safeguarding marine protected areas. Insurance companies can track the vessels they insure.

“We’re hoping it will be useful to a lot of different sectors,” Savitz said.

Read the full story at the Washington Post

New way to publicly monitor global fishing changes the game

September 16, 2016 — World leaders in ocean conservation and management are gathering in Washington this week for Secretary John Kerry‘s Our Ocean conference — a convening of global policymakers aimed a tackling some of the greatest challenges facing our seas and the wildlife that depend on them. I’m especially excited about this year’s meeting because it will mark the moment when we can truly begin a new era in fisheries management thanks to a groundbreaking new digital tool that will allow governments and citizens around the world to improve management to bring back fishery abundance and strengthen food security.

Early Thursday morning, we made Global Fishing Watch available to the public. Now for the first time ever, anyone with an internet connection can monitor global fishing activity, in near real-time, for free. Oceana partnered with SkyTruth and Google to produce a public platform that uses satellite data, cloud computing and machine learning to identify fishing activity all over the world and provide it to users in an intuitive internet-based interface.

Until today, the only way to really know what fishing vessels were doing was to have eyes physically trained on the ships, or to track vessels one at a time, point-by-point, day by day. That process is now automated by Global Fishing Watch so that anyone can instantly look at the tracks of tens of thousands of vessels, everywhere they fish, at any time over the past five years, within just a few days back from the present. This completely changes the game.

Ships over a certain size are required to use the Automatic Identification System (AIS) to avoid at-sea collisions. This broadcast data is collected by terrestrial and satellite receivers, and Global Fishing Watch analyzes it to locate apparent fishing activity. Now, for the first time, everyone can see where ships are fishing, and when. The applications of this technology to fishery policy and management are numerous. Early testers of Global Fishing Watch have consistently been bringing us new application ideas that even we, the developers, hadn’t imagined.

Read the full story at The Hill

Thanks To Technology, You Might Soon Know Where Your Seafood Actually Comes From

September 16, 2016 — Millions of people worldwide depend on seafood to survive. An estimated 450 million people get their primary source of food from the ocean, and according to the World Bank, fishing makes up at least 10 percent of the global economy.

But for all its popularity and importance, the seafood industry’s supply chain is notoriously opaque, complex and plagued with problems, including illegal fishing and seafood fraud, which can seriously deplete fish populations and harm marine habitats.

Seafood lovers often have no idea where their fish or shrimp were caught, and even whether or not their snapper was the real McCoy.

Thanks to improved technology, together with the efforts of businesses, nonprofits and governments, however, “ocean-to-table” visibility is fast becoming a reality. And this, experts say, may help save our ailing seas.

Read the full story at the Huffington Post

Switch and chips: 20 percent of fish are purposely mislabeled, sometimes dangerously

September 9, 2016 — In the bizarro world of seafood fraud, a fish is not always what it seems.

When sold in Brazil, largetooth sawfish — a species classified as critically endangered — becomes anonymous “shark.”

When sold in a certain Santa Monica, Calif., sushi shop, illegal whale meat became fatty tuna. (The restaurant has since shut down.)

And when sold across the United States, cheap Asian catfish becomes one of 18 types of white fish fraudsters want it to be, according to a recent report.

Worldwide, one in five pieces of fish meat is incorrectly named on the menu or label, revealed the new survey representing 25,000 fish samples.

Oceana, a marine conservation and advocacy group, released the report on Wednesday, and updated the global map it created in 2014. The new map is interactive and highlights news stories of restaurant fraud, as well as DNA analysis and other scientific studies.

Read the full story at the Washington Post