Saving Seafood

The deadly secret of China’s invisible armada

August 26, 2020 — The battered wooden “ghost boats” drift through the Sea of Japan for months, their only cargo the corpses of starved North Korean fishermen whose bodies have been reduced to skeletons. Last year more than 150 of these macabre vessels washed ashore in Japan, and there have been more than 500 in the past five years.

For years the grisly phenomenon mystified Japanese police, whose best guess was that climate change pushed the squid population farther from North Korea, driving the country’s desperate fishermen dangerous distances from shore, where they become stranded and die from exposure.

But an NBC News investigation, based on new satellite data, has revealed what marine researchers now say is a more likely explanation: China is sending a previously invisible armada of industrial boats to illegally fish in North Korean waters, violently displacing smaller North Korean boats and spearheading a decline in once-abundant squid stocks of more than 70 percent.

Read the full story at NBC News

Controversial Pesticides Are Suspected Of Starving Fish

November 4, 2019 — There’s new evidence that a widely used family of pesticides called neonicotinoids, already controversial because they can be harmful to pollinators, could be risky for insects and fish that live in water, too.

The evidence comes from Lake Shinji, which lies near Japan’s coast, next to the Sea of Japan.

Masumi Yamamuro, a scientist with the Geological Survey of Japan, says the lake is famous for its views of the setting sun. “It’s amazingly beautiful,” she says.

Lake Shinji was also the site of thriving fisheries. People harvested clams, and eels, and small fish called smelts. But, Yamamuro says, about a decade ago, people noticed that fish populations had declined drastically. “I was asked to investigate the cause of this decrease,” she says.

It was a puzzle. Yamamuro says the decline in fish populations did not seem to coincide with anything that people were keeping track of, like the lake’s salinity, or levels of pollution.

But she noticed something curious. One kind of fish in the lake was doing fine. This one had a more diverse diet; it could eat algae, as well as tiny insects in the water. The eels and the smelts that were dying off relied on insects and crustaceans for food. And that food source was vanishing.

Read the full story at New England Public Radio

Russia learning to live with less pollock

March 14, 2019 — Russian fisheries are getting prepared for expected reductions in total allowable catch (TAC) for Pollock, the biggest species in the national harvest.

Companies are seeking to keep their income stable by investing in processing facilities in an effort to produce more fillet. However, there are doubts that there will be sufficient demand for deeper-processed food.

Generational shift brings new challenges

In Russia, Pollock is fished in the Russian Far East, mainly in the Sea of Okhotsk, the Bering Sea, and the Sea of Japan. In 2018, large stocks of the species were also discovered in the Chukchee Sea – scientists remain eager to find out the reasons for this migration.

Currently, the total biomass of pollock in the Sea of Okhotsk is estimated at 11.6 million metric tons (MT), with six to seven of those tons being fishable. TAC for pollock is traditionally set at a level of about 20 percent of spawning biomass to keep the stock above the target level. TAC in a given year depends on the productivity of recent recruitment, which is affected by a number of various factors, including climate, hydrological, food abundance, etc. While the recruitments of 2011 and 2013 were well above the multi-average level – which resulted in high volumes of harvest – there haven’t been any such productive years since.

Read the full story at Seafood Source