Saving Seafood

Study links 59 percent of industrial fishing offenses to Chinese vessels

March 30, 2022 — At least one-third of all recorded fishery offenses are associated with industrial fishing vessels – specifically just 20 companies and 450 industrial fishing vessels – and over half of the industrial offenses have Chinese beneficial ownership.

According to “Fish Crimes in the Global Oceans,” prepared for ocean conservation group Oceana and published in Science Advances, 59 percent of offences in the industrial fishing sector are related to Chinese owned vessels. Fifteen percent were tied to Indonesian vessels and 12 percent were associated with South Korean vessels.

Read the full story at SeafoodSource

 

Global fisheries could still become more profitable despite global warming

August 30, 2018 — Researchers from Japan’s Hokkaido University, the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, and Environmental Defense Fund  (EDF) found that harvesting sustainable amounts of seafood globally over the next 75 years can lead to higher total food production and profits, even taking into consideration the fish populations which are projected to decline as the ocean warms and habitats change.

This is because, under what has been determined as the best management scenario, some major fish and shellfish stocks that are commercially harvested, broadly referred to as fisheries, will grow and become more profitable, offsetting the many others projected to shrink or even disappear. On a global average, profitability could rise by 14 billion USD and harvest by 217 million metric tons above today’s levels, according to the study.

There is a catch. In the model, the growth was achieved under the projected moderate warming of 2.2°C (3.9°F) above average global temperatures by 2100. But if temperatures rise further, global fish harvest and profits are expected to decline below today’s levels even with the best management in place.

The researchers say their study, published in Science Advances, conveys an important message: the oceans can continue to be a source of healthy seafood and sustainable livelihoods for billions of people, but only if action is taken to manage the stocks well and limit the carbon emissions that drive climate change.

Read the full story at Science Daily

Fish populations could rise in warming climate with better management

August 30, 2018 — Better management of fisheries and fishing rights around the world could increase profits and leave more fish in the sea as long as measures to meet climate obligations are taken, new research has found.

Even if temperatures rise by as much as 4C above pre-industrial levels – in the upper range of current forecasts – the damaging effects on fishing can be reduced through improving how stocks are fished and managed.

Governments are meeting from 4 September in New York for the first round of talks on a new global treaty of the high seas, which would aim to conserve overfished stocks and make access to key fisheries more equitable. Any agreement is likely to take several years to negotiateand longer to come into force, but scientists say there is no time to be lost, given the magnitude of the threat to the world’s marine ecosystems.

Climate change is already causing the movement of some species as their traditional habitats grow warmer, and overfishing is wreaking heavy damage on stocks. However, by adapting fisheries management to a warming climate, and instituting better systems such as monitoring of fleets, the global catch can be increased despite these factors, according to the paper published on Wednesday in the journal Science Advances.

“This is a positive message amid the doom and gloom,” said Kristin Kleisner, one of the authors of the study and a senior scientist at the US Environmental Defense Fund. “We can control how we manage our fisheries. We will have severe effects [from climate change] but this shows what we can do as humans to control that.”

Read the full story The Guardian

Researchers map hot spots of transfer of fish catch at sea

July 26, 2018 — It could be considered the global CSI for high seas fisheries. In two new groundbreaking studies, researchers from Dalhousie University, Global Fishing Watch and SkyTruth have applied cutting-edge technology to map exactly where fishing boats may be transferring their catch to cargo vessels at sea.

Known as transshipment, the practice increases the efficiency of fishing by eliminating trips back to port for fishing vessels. However, as it often occurs out of sight and over the horizon, it creates major challenges, including enabling illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing.

“Because catches from different boats are mixed up during transshipment, we often have no idea what was caught legally and what wasn’t,” said Kristina Boerder, a Ph.D. student in Dalhousie University’s Department of Biology and lead author on the Science Advances paper, published this week.

Transshipment can also facilitate human rights abuses and has been implicated in other crimes such as weapons and drug trafficking. It often occurs in the high seas, beyond the reach of any nation’s jurisdiction, and where policy-makers and enforcement agencies may be slow to act against an issue they cannot see. By applying machine learning techniques to vessel tracking data, researchers are bringing unprecedented transparency to the practice.

“So far, this practise was out of sight out of mind, but now that we can track it using satellites, we can begin to know where our  truly comes from,” says Dr. Boris Worm, a Marine Biology Professor in Dalhousie’s Faculty of Science, and co-author of the Science Advances paper.

Read the full story from the Global Fishing Watch at PHYS

 

New England’s 1816 ‘Mackerel Year’ and climate change today

January 19, 2017 — Hundreds of articles have been written about the largest volcanic eruption in recorded history, at Indonesia’s Mt. Tambora just over 200 years ago. But for a small group of New England-based researchers, one more Tambora story needed to be told, one related to its catastrophic effects in the Gulf of Maine that may carry lessons for intertwined human-natural systems facing climate change around the world today.

In the latest issue of Science Advances, first author and research fellow Karen Alexander at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and 11 others including aquatic ecologists, climate scientists and environmental historians recount their many-layered, multidisciplinary investigation into the effects of Tambora on coastal fish and commercial fisheries.

Alexander says, “We approached our study as a forensic examination. We knew that Tambora’s extreme cold had afflicted New England, Europe, China and other places for as long as 17 months. But no one we knew of had investigated coastal ecosystems and fisheries. So, we looked for evidence close to home.”

In work that integrates the social and natural sciences, they used historical fish export data, weather readings,  and town growth chronologies and other sources to discover Tambora’s effects on the Gulf of Maine’s complex human and natural system.

The 1815 eruption caused a long-lasting, extreme climate event in 1816 known as the “year without a summer.” As volcanic winter settled on much of the Northern Hemisphere, crops failed, livestock died and famine swept over many lands. In New England, crop yields may have fallen by 90 percent. The researchers found that 1816 was also called “the mackerel year,” a clue to what they would find regarding fisheries.

Besides Tambora’s climate effects, the authors examined other system-wide influences to explain observed trends. These included historical events such as the War of 1812, human population growth, fish habitat obstruction due to dam building and changes in fishing gear that might have affected fisheries at the time. Employing historical methods in a Complex Adaptive Systems approach allowed them to group and order data at different scales of organization and to identify statistically significant processes that corresponded to known outcomes, Alexander says.

Read the full story at Phys.org

 

Pollutants in Fish Could Disrupt Your Defenses to Toxins

April 18, 2016 — Human defense mechanisms could be disrupted by the presence of a class of organic pollutants in fish and other food, according to new research.

The study, published in the journal Science Advances, appears to be the first to identify the mechanism by which chemicals like flame retardants—present in many household furniture items, like sofas and mattresses—and the pesticide DDT block a key protein from removing toxins from the body. P-glycoprotein, the protein in question, defends against toxins that entered the body by transporting them for removal. The new research shows that persistent organic pollutants, known as POPs, latch onto proteins and prevent them from functioning.

“These environmental chemicals form intimate interactions,” says study author Amro Hamdoun of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego. “But instead of being expelled, these proteins interfere with the ability of p-glycoprotein from doing its job.”

Awareness about the risks of POPs is nothing new. Public health campaigners have sought to remove POPs from the environment for decades, and a 2001 treaty even committed countries to take measures to reduce human exposure to the pollutants.

Read the full story at Time