Saving Seafood

Fish populations around the world are improving

January 16, 2020 — The following was released by Sustainable Fisheries UW:

Let’s enjoy some unequivocal, inarguable good news: a paper published today in PNAS, Hilborn et al. 2020, shows that on average, scientifically-assessed fish populations around the world are healthy or improving. And, for fish populations that are not doing well, there is a clear roadmap to sustainability. With Australia on fire and scares of World War III, the start of 2020 and the new decade has been awful; hopefully Hilborn et al. 2020 can kickstart a decade of ocean optimism.

Hilborn et al. 2020 counters the perception that fish populations around the world are declining and the only solution is closing vast swaths of ocean to fishing. Instead, Hilborn et al. 2020 argues that increasing scientific, management, and enforcement capacity will lead to more abundant and sustainable oceans. The major takeaway of the paper is that fishery management works—when fisheries are managed, they are sustained. The key is following the science-to-management blueprint. Scientific data collection and fishery assessment comes first, then fishing regulation and enforcement of fishing policies. With the blueprint in place, most fisheries around the world are sustainable or improving.

The paper uses updates to the RAM Legacy Stock Assessment Database, a decades-long project to assemble data on fish populations that are scientifically assessed. As of 2019, the database contains data on 882 marine fish populations, representing about half of reported wild-caught seafood. In 2009, the database contained data on only 166, representing a much smaller proportion of global seafood. Researchers have spent the last 10 years adding to the database, and with today’s publication, update the global status of fish stocks. They found that, on average, fish populations are above target levels. Not every stock is doing well, but on average, things are much better than they were 2 decades ago. How nice: an environmental story where things are better now than they were in the past!

The paper describes the global status of fish stocks, but it also tells the story of fishery sustainability from the past 50 years.

Read the full story at Sustainable Fisheries UW

Fish stock abundance increases when intensely managed, study shows

January 16, 2020 — Studies on global fisheries rarely make national news, but University of Washington professor of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences Ray Hilborn says that the public perception of fisheries is still recovering from one eye-catching study in 2006.

“A paper come out that said if current trends continue, all fish stocks will be collapsed by 2048, and that got front page New York Times, front page Washington Post, and it was totally wrong,” Hilborn said. “It was so contrary to my experience and lots of people, you can imagine almost everyone working on fisheries in Alaska. Ultimately I got together with the first author of the paper and we figured we could actually try to understand why we had such different perspectives.”

The result of the collaboration was a paper published in 2009 which showed that on average, stock abundance appeared to be stable.

“What they had assumed is that if that catch goes down, the catch is declining, and that simply wasn’t true. Most of the stocks they called collapsed, the catch had declined for other reason. Many times regulation, some times international 200 mile zones,” Hilborn said.

Hilborn worked to build a data set on the abundance of fish stocks, rather than just the reported catch.

More than a decade later, Hilborn’s research shows how intensely managing fisheries has resulted in increased abundance of fish stocks.

Read the full story at KTUU

Fish populations are thriving in areas with intense management, global study finds

January 14, 2020 — A new study has shown that fishery management, when done well, works, and is the solution for keeping fisheries sustainable.

By looking at data from about 30 countries around the world, a group of researchers have concluded that intense fisheries management has led to healthy or improving fish populations, while a dearth of management has led to overfishing. The researchers published their results in a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on 13 January.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

New paper showing fish stocks increasing where managed

January 14, 2020 — Nearly half of the fish caught worldwide are from stocks that are scientifically monitored and, on average, are increasing in abundance. Effective management appears to be the main reason these stocks are at sustainable levels or successfully rebuilding.

That is the main finding of an international project led by the University of Washington to compile and analyze data from fisheries around the world. The results were published Jan. 13 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“There is a narrative that fish stocks are declining around the world, that fisheries management is failing and we need new solutions — and it’s totally wrong,” said lead author Ray Hilborn, a professor in the UW School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences. “Fish stocks are not all declining around the world. They are increasing in many places, and we already know how to solve problems through effective fisheries management.”

The project builds on a decade-long international collaboration to assemble estimates of the status of fish stocks — or distinct populations of fish — around the world. This information helps scientists and managers know where overfishing is occurring, or where some areas could support even more fishing. Now the team’s database includes information on nearly half of the world’s fish catch, up from about 20% represented in the last compilation in 2009.

“The key is, we want to know how well we are doing, where we need to improve, and what the problems are,” Hilborn said. “Given that most countries are trying to provide long-term sustainable yield of their fisheries, we want to know where we are overfishing, and where there is potential for more yield in places we’re not fully exploiting.”

Over the past decade, the research team built a network of collaborators in countries and regions throughout the world, inputting their data on valuable fish populations in places such as the Mediterranean, Peru, Chile, Russia, Japan and northwest Africa. Now about 880 fish stocks are included in the database, giving a much more comprehensive picture worldwide of the health and status of fish populations.

Still, most of the fish stocks in South Asia and Southeast Asia do not have scientific estimates of health and status available. Fisheries in India, Indonesia and China alone represent 30% to 40% of the world’s fish catch that is essentially unassessed.

“There are still big gaps in the data and these gaps are more difficult to fill,” said co-author Ana Parma, a principal scientist at Argentina’s National Scientific and Technical Research Council and a member of The Nature Conservancy global board. “This is because the available information on smaller fisheries is more scattered, has not been standardized and is harder to collate, or because fisheries in many regions are not regularly monitored.”

The researchers paired information about fish stocks with recently published data on fisheries management activities in about 30 countries. This analysis found that more intense management led to healthy or improving fish stocks, while little to no management led to overfishing and poor stock status.

These results show that fisheries management works when applied, and the solution for sustaining fisheries around the world is implementing effective fisheries management, the authors explained.

“With the data we were able to assemble, we could test whether fisheries management allows stocks to recover. We found that, emphatically, the answer is yes,” said co-author Christopher Costello, a professor of environmental and resource economics at University of California, Santa Barbara, and a board member with Environmental Defense Fund. “This really gives credibility to the fishery managers and governments around the world that are willing to take strong actions.”

Fisheries management should be tailored to fit the characteristics of the different fisheries and the needs of specific countries and regions for it to be successful. Approaches that have been effective in many large-scale industrial fisheries in developed countries cannot be expected to work for small-scale fisheries, especially in regions with limited economic and technical resources and weak governance systems, Parma said.

The main goal should be to reduce the total fishing pressure when it is too high, and find ways to incentivize fishing fleets to value healthy fish stocks.

“There isn’t really a one-size-fits-all management approach,” Costello said. “We need to design the way we manage fisheries so that fishermen around the world have a long-term stake in the health of the ocean.”

Other co-authors are from University of Victoria, University of Cape Town, National Institute of Fisheries Research (Morocco), Rutgers University, Seikai National Fisheries Research Institute Japan, CSIRO Oceans and Atmosphere, Fisheries New Zealand, Wildlife Conservation Society, Marine and Freshwater Research Center (Argentina), European Commission, Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology, Center for the Study of Marine Systems, Sustainable Fisheries Partnership, The Nature Conservancy, and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

Hilborn and collaborators recently presented this work at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations’ International Symposium on Fisheries Sustainability in Rome.

The research was funded by the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis Science for Nature and People Partnership. Individual authors received funding from The Nature Conservancy, The Wildlife Conservation Society, the Walton Family Foundation, Environmental Defense Fund, the Richard C. and Lois M. Worthington Endowed Professorship in Fisheries Management and donations from 12 fishing companies.

Read the full paper here

Will cutting salmon out of our diets save the Puget Sound orcas?

August 29, 2019 — Salmon is a popular food in the Pacific Northwest for humans and orcas alike. But, the Southern Resident Orcas are struggling with their sole food source, Chinook Salmon, getting smaller and smaller.

With that in mind, is it still a good idea for us to consume fish? Will cutting salmon out of our diets help our orca population rebound?

Ray Hilborn is a professor at the University of Washington’s University of School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences. His research focuses on ways to best manage fisheries to provide sustainable benefits to human society.

“In general, fisheries have quite a bit lower environmental impact than livestock, and even with respect to crops, many fisheries look very good compared to crops,” said Hilborn.

Read the full story at K5 News

RAY HILBORN: Keep eating fish; it’s the best way to feed the world

June 3, 2019 — This week, the National Marine Sanctuary Foundation (NMSF) is convening Capitol Hill Ocean Week in Washington, D.C. Additionally, President Trump has declared the month of June “National Ocean Month” in recognition of the importance of the ocean to the economy, national security, and environment of the United States.

For the duration of Ocean Week, Saving Seafood will share materials related to the sustainable and economically vital U.S. commercial fishing and seafood industries, including information tied directly to events being organized as part of the NMSF conference.

To kick off the week, Saving Seafood is sharing the following article on the importance of eating fish to global food security and the environment. It was written by renowned fisheries scientist Dr. Ray Hilborn and published by the Oxford University Press Blog last week:

The famous ocean explorer, Sylvia Earle, has long advocated that people stop eating fish. Recently, George Monbiot made a similar plea in The Guardian – there’s only one way to save the life in our oceans, stop eating fish – which, incidentally, would condemn several million people to starvation.

In both cases, it’s facile reasoning. The oceans may suffer from many things, but fishing isn’t the biggest. Earle and Monbiot’s sweeping pronouncements lack any thought for the consequences of rejecting fish and substituting fish protein for what? Steak? That delicious sizzler on your plate carries the most appallingly large environmental costs regarding fresh water, grain production, land use, erosion, loss of topsoil, transportation, you name it.

Luckily for our planet, not everyone eats steak. You’re vegan, you say, and your conscience is clean. An admirable choice – so long as there aren’t too many of you. For the sake of argument and numbers, let us assume that we can substitute plant protein in the form of tofu, made from soybeans, for fish protein. Soybeans need decent land; in fact it would take 2.58 times the land area of England to produce enough tofu to substitute for no longer available fish. That extra amount of decent arable land just isn’t available – unless we can persuade Brazil, Ecuador and Columbia to cut down more of the Amazon rainforest. We would also add 1.71 times the amount of greenhouse gases that it takes to catch the fish.

And, again for the sake of argument, were we to substitute beef for fish, we would need 192.43 Englands to raise all that cattle and greenhouse gases would rocket to 42.4 times what they are from fishing.

But aren’t there alternatives that we can eat with a clean conscience? It depends. First, we must accept the inescapable truth that everyone has to eat. You and I and another few billion humans right down to the single cell organisms. The second inescapable truth arises from the first but is often ignored, is that there is no free lunch. The big variable in this business of eating is deciding the appropriate price to the environment.

Read the full opinion piece at the Oxford University Press (OUP) Blog

ALASKA: Net recycling effort spreads to Southeast; almanac seeks stories

April 18, 2019 — The Panhandle plans to be the next Alaska region to give new life to old fishing gear by sending it to plastic recycling centers. The tons of nets and lines piled up in local lots and landfills will become the raw material for soda bottles, cell phone cases, sunglasses, skateboards, swimsuits and more.

Juneau, Haines, Petersburg and possibly Sitka have partnered with Net Your Problem to launch an effort this year to send old or derelict seine and gillnets to a recycler in Richmond, British Columbia.

“We’re going to be working in a new location with a new material and sending it to a new recycler,” said Nicole Baker, founder of Net Your Problem and the force behind fishing gear recycling in Alaska.

Baker, a former fisheries observer who also is a research assistant for Ray Hilborn at the University of Washington, jumpstarted recycling programs for trawl nets, crab and halibut line two years ago at Dutch Harbor and Kodiak quickly followed. The nets can weigh from 5,000 to 25,000 tons and can cost $350 to $500 per ton for disposal in landfills. The community/industry collaborations in both towns have so far sent 300,000 pounds of gear in seven vans to Europe for recycling.

“Each fishing port will have its own special logistics plan but the general role is the same,” she said. “You need somebody to give you the nets, truck them around, load them and ship them.”

Read the full story at the Alaska Journal of Commerce

Managing recreational fisheries alongside commercial fisheries

April 15, 2019 — The following is an excerpt from an article published by Sustainable Fisheries UW:

Arlinghaus et al. 2019, an article in last week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, outlined a 5-step plan for integrating recreational fishing into commercial fishery management. In the paper, scientists called for reforms on both the commercial and recreational side to produce better overall sustainability.

Recognizing recreational fishers

I write a lot about fisheries as food. Essentially, the entire point of commercial fisheries is to provide food; but with the massive scale of industrial harvest, it’s easy to forget that fish provide other benefits (like leisure and recreation) that have important economic and social outcomes. Recreational fishing provides jobs and income for tens of thousands of people and enjoyment for millions. Around 10% of people in developed nations fish for pleasure, amounting to over 200 million people worldwide.

Recreational vs commercial fishing

Recreational fishers outnumber commercial fishers 5 to 1, yet commercial fishing brings in 8x the amount of fish. Naturally, this disparity creates resentment between the two sides and conflict is not unusual, e.g. Atlantic striped bass. Arlinghaus et al. 2019 proposes a 5-point framework for integrating recreational fishing into commercial management that will hopefully lead to conflict resolution and improved sustainability.

“Even countries with strong governance for fisheries fail to integrate angling into their fisheries and conservation management system effectively. We are convinced that fisheries management and conservation measures would be more effective if the interests of anglers were given equal consideration to those of commercial fishers and other stakeholders,” stated the lead author of the study, Robert Arlinghaus, explaining his expectations of the reform process.

Read the full story at Sustainable Fisheries UW

Report finds seafood mislabeling “rampant” in New York

December 18, 2018 — The New York Attorney General’s office may take enforcement action against some supermarket chains after it found “rampant” seafood mislabeling at grocers across the state, according to a recent report.

The report, from New York Attorney General Barbara D. Underwood, found that around a quarter of the seafood sampled at New York grocery retailers was mislabeled. These findings are the result of the first major U.S. government investigation of seafood fraud at supermarket chains.

The incidence of mislabeling popular species was “rampant” among New York retailers, the Underwood’s office said in statement. For example, 27.6 percent of species sold as “wild” salmon were mislabeled, oftentimes being substituted for farmed salmon.

A significant 67 percent of red snapper samples were mislabeled, the report found. Approximately 87.5 percent of lemon sole was also discovered to be mislabeled.

“The substitutes were often cheaper, less desirable, and less environmentally sustainable species,” the AG office statement said. “This includes farm-raised salmon sold as wild salmon, lane snapper sold as red snapper, and swai sold as lemon sole.”

Ray Hilborn, a professor of marine science at the University of Washington and a member of the International Fisheries Innovation Network steering committee, said the report showed the mislabeling was at times intentional and at times accidental.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

New Ray Hilborn study investigates environmental impact of aquaculture

June 13, 2018 — A new study from fisheries expert Ray Hilborn compares the environmental impact of various forms of animal husbandry.

The study, which appeared in “Frontiers in Ecology and The Environment,” is an all-encompassing look on how animal protein production affects the environment.

“From the consumers’ standpoint, choice matters. If you’re an environmentalist, what you eat makes a difference,” Hilborn said. “We found there are obvious good choices and really obvious bad choices.”

Hilborn, a professor at the University of Washington’s School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences, has been working on the study for almost a decade. The study investigates the impacts of animal-rearing including energy use, greenhouse gas emissions, fertilizer and other excess nutrient exposure to the environment, and emissions of substances that can cause acid rain.

The study found industrial beef and catfish farming to be among the most environmentally costly meat and seafood production methods. On the other hand, farmed mollusks and small wild-caught fish pose the least amount of environmental impact.

Because constant water circulation is needed to raise species like shrimp, tilapia, and catfish, livestock production generally uses less energy than aquaculture. But at the same time, beef production results in emissions of large amounts of methane. As a result, both catfish aquaculture and beef production contributes 20 times more greenhouse gases than farmed mollusks or farmed salmon and chicken.

Read the full story at Seafood Source