Saving Seafood

Research helps untangle the complexity of small-scale fisheries

November 26, 2025 — Across the world’s coral reefs, rivers, lakes, coastal waters, and high seas, fishers with simple tools and small boats harvest some 40% of the world’s wild-caught fish.

These small-scale fishers may feed as much as a quarter of the global population, providing essential nutrients and upholding local economies. Yet despite their importance, they face growing threats from climate change, pollution, and overfishing.

 Asolution for ‘policy paralysis and inaction’

Aside from the volume of their annual catch and reliance on family labor, small-scale fisheries are marked by contrasts. Producers target more than 2,500 species in an array of habitats using a wide range of nets, traps, hooks, and boats, with different levels of access to refrigeration. While some fisheries operate individually and provide food locally, others are corporations with paid crews and extensive market reach.

“All these factors make developing clear pathways for sustainable consumption very difficult,” said Xavier Basurto, a professor of environmental social sciences at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability and a senior author of a new analysis of 1,255 marine producers in 43 countries.

The challenge extends beyond fisheries. “The varying definitions of small-scale producers in farming, fisheries, and forestry give rise to confusion and lack of clarity in many legal documents and have been linked to policy paralysis and inaction,” Basurto and co-authors write in the study, published Oct. 14 in Nature Food.

Read the full article at the Stanford Report

Stanford lab develops high-tech tools to study whales in the wild

July 15, 2020 — Scanning the airwaves over Monterey Bay with a hand-held antenna, Stanford University researchers listen for blue whales – or, more precisely, they listen for the suction tags they’ve stuck on blue whales. The first beep sounds and the captain whips the boat on course, following the quickening signal to find the surfacing giant. The three-person crew must reach the animal before it disappears under the ocean, hidden from sight, radar and study for another 10 minutes. [Note: This research was conducted prior to the novel coronavirus pandemic, and has been on hold in accordance with current guidance regarding research operations.]

The crew in this fast-paced chase hails from the lab of Jeremy Goldbogen, assistant professor of biology in the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford’s Hopkins Marine Station. In the Monterey Bay and around the world, Goldbogen and his team employ drones, sound-based mapping equipment, and sensor-packed tags to demystify the lives and biology of rorqual whales – large whales that feed by lunging at groups of prey and filtering water through baleen plates. These include humpback, minke, fin and of course blue whales, which at nearly 100-feet long are the largest creatures known to have ever lived.

“The largest animals of all time can’t be in a laboratory in a building, so we’ve been developing technology that pushes the envelope in terms of understanding how animals operate in the open ocean,” said Goldbogen.

Read the full story at Stanford News

Stanford experts highlight oceans’ role in solving food insecurity

June 3, 2020 — A key to solving global hunger – which is predicted to intensify during the COVID-19 pandemic – may lie in the ocean. In fact, the ocean could produce up to 75 percent more seafood than it does today, and drive sustainable economic growth, according to Stanford’s Rosamond Naylor and Jim Leape.

Stanford Report spoke with Leape, co-director of Stanford’s Center for Ocean Solutions, and Naylor, the William Wrigley Professor in Earth System Science, about how global food policies can better integrate “blue foods” from marine and freshwater systems, how to address gaps in current thinking, and what world leaders can do to create a healthier, more sustainable food system.

The researchers are part of a major global initiative called the Blue Food Assessment, which is the first comprehensive review of aquatic foods and their roles in the global food system. Naylor will discuss the initiative on June 3 at the Virtual Ocean Dialogues, an online gathering of business, government and public sector leaders who are invested in creating a more resilient ocean.

Read the full story at Stanford News

Substance in crude oil harms fish hearts, could affect humans as well

January 31, 2017 — Research from Stanford University’s Hopkins Marine Station has identified a substance in oil that’s to blame for the cardiotoxicity seen in fish exposed to crude oil spills. More than a hazard for marine life exposed to oil, the contaminant this team identified is abundant in air pollution and could pose a global threat to human health.

The pollutant at the center of this finding, phenanthrene, is a type of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH). Due to widespread use of petroleum, PAHs are also found in land-based stormwater runoff, contaminated soil from defunct industrial sites and air pollution. PAHs have been investigated as cancer-causing chemicals for nearly a hundred years but other potential health effects have been given far less attention. The environmental health risks of phenanthrene, in particular, have received secondary consideration to other PAHs more strongly implicated in the development of cancer.

Read the full story at Stanford News

What the ‘sixth extinction’ will look like in the oceans: The largest species die off first

September 15, 2016 — We mostly can’t see it around us, and too few of us seem to care — but nonetheless, scientists are increasingly convinced that the world is barreling towards what has been called a “sixth mass extinction” event. Simply put, species are going extinct at a rate that far exceeds what you would expect to see naturally, as a result of a major perturbation to the system.

In this case, the perturbation is us — rather than, say, an asteroid. As such, you might expect to see some patterns to extinctions that reflect our particular way of causing ecological destruction. And indeed, a new study published Wednesday in Science magazine confirms this. For the world’s oceans, it finds, threats of extinction aren’t apportioned equally among all species — rather, the larger ones, in terms of body size and mass, are uniquely imperiled right now.

From sharks to whales, giant clams, sea turtles, and tuna, the disproportionate threat to larger marine organisms reflects the “unique human propensity to cull the largest members of a population,” the authors write.

“What to us was surprising was that we did not see a similar kind of pattern in any of the previous mass extinction events that we studied,” said geoscientist Jonathan Payne of Stanford University, the study’s lead author. “So that indicated that there really is no good ecological analogue…this pattern has not happened before in the half billion years of the animal fossil record.”

The researchers conducted the work through a statistical analysis of 2,497 different marine animal groups at one taxonomic level higher than the level of species — called “genera.” And they found that increases in an organism’s body size were strongly linked to an increased risk of extinction in the present period — but that this was not the case in the Earth’s distant past.

Indeed, during the past 66 million years, there was actually a small link between smaller body sizes and going extinct, marking the present as a strong reversal. “The extreme bias against large-bodied animals distinguishes the modern diversity crisis from all potential deep-time analogs,” the researchers write.

Read the full story at The Washington Post

Eat fish, lower your risk of deadly heart attack

June 28, 2016 — NEW YORK — Fish used to be called “brain food”, but it may be heart food instead.

Omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids, when obtained through foods in the diet, appear to reduce the risk of fatal heart attack, death due to coronary artery disease (CAD), and sudden cardiac death by about 10 percent, according to new research.

The study, published in JAMA Internal Medicine, looked at the three forms of these fatty acids: α-linolenic acid (ALA), docosapentaenoic acid (DPA), and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA), which have all shown beneficial effects on things like blood pressure and oxygen demand by heart muscle cells.

Some may reduce the likelihood of the dangerous heart rhythms during a period of reduced blood flow to heart muscle cells (what happens during heart attacks).

Researchers at Stanford and Tufts University studied data on 45,637 patients from more than 15 countries who had not had previous coronary artery disease.

Read the full story at WTOP