August 29 2025 — An upcoming event at Palo Alto, California, U.S.A.-based Stanford University will challenge young engineers to use AI to optimize sustainable seafood catch for fishing companies without losing revenue.
AI Commerce Inc., an AI-enabled e-commerce company also based in Palo Alto, has announced that it is putting on the second annual Sushi Hackathon on 3 October at the Stanford Alumni Center.
July 19, 2021 — A friend used to tell me “something’s a-fish” when things were off kilter. Today, the global food system is not just “a-fish”; it’s failing billions of people.
Hunger, malnutrition and obesity coexist in rich and poor countries alike, often in the same town or even in the same home. Diabetes, heart disease, coastal dead zones and other social burdens connected to our food system continue to rise. In recognition of this urgent challenge, the United Nations will hold a global summit in September for government, business, nonprofit organizations and civil society leaders to map a more sustainable, healthy and equitable food system.
Transforming our food system will require a new mind-set and more careful consideration of blue foods — aquatic animals, plants and algae cultivated and captured in freshwater and marine environments.
Until now, the movement to build productive and sustainable food systems has focused on transforming land-based crops and livestock, largely overlooking the critical role that fish and other aquatic foods play in nutrition, livelihoods and ecosystems around the world. That role will increase as food production becomes increasingly vulnerable to climate change.
May 5, 2021 — The gulf’s sardine fishery has collapsed four times in the past 30 years, and researchers in California worry about the future of the sardine industry.
Alfredo Giron of Stanford University and Octavio Aburto of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography looked at how sardines are faring.
The study shows that there are natural boom-bust cycles where the small fish are plentiful and then scarce.
March 25, 2021 — Despite aquaculture’s potential to feed a growing world population while relieving pressure on badly depleted oceans, the industry has been plagued by questions about its environmental impacts.
But over the years, the diverse industry—which ranges from massive open-ocean salmon cages to family farm freshwater tilapia ponds—has made significant strides toward sustainability, according to a new Stanford-led analysis.
The study notes, however, that in order for the global aquaculture sector to deliver on its full promise, more effective oversight measures are needed to help ensure that its environmentally sound systems are economically viable.
The findings, published March 25 in Nature, could help shape how consumers think about the seafood they buy, and inform governance strategies critical to global food and nutrition security.
“As the demand for seafood around the world continues to expand, aquaculture will keep growing,” said study lead author Rosamond Naylor, the William Wrigley Professor of Earth System Science in Stanford’s School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences (Stanford Earth). “If we don’t get it right, we risk the same environmental problems we’ve seen in land-based crop and livestock systems: nutrient pollution, excessive use of antibiotics and habitat change that threatens biodiversity.”
March 25, 2021 — Twenty years ago, as farmed salmon and shrimp started spreading in supermarket freezers, came an influential scientific paper that warned of an environmental mess: Fish farms were gobbling up wild fish stocks, spreading disease and causing marine pollution.
This week, some of the same scientists who published that report issued a new paper concluding that fish farming, in many parts of the world, at least, is a whole lot better. The most significant improvement, they said, was that farmed fish were not being fed as much wild fish. They were being fed more plants, like soy.
In short, the paper found, farmed fish like salmon and trout had become mostly vegetarians.
Synthesizing hundreds of research papers carried out over the last 20 years across the global aquaculture industry, the latest study was published on Wednesday in the journal Nature.
February 12, 2021 — The consumption of plastic by marine animals is an increasingly pervasive problem, with litter turning up in the bellies of wildlife as varied as mammals, birds, turtles and fish. However, according to a research review by ecologists at Stanford University’s Hopkins Marine Station and PhD student Alex McInturf at UC Davis, the problem is impacting species unevenly, with some more susceptible to eating a plastic dinner than others. With billions of people around the world relying on seafood for sustenance and financial security, this research, published Feb 9. in the journal Global Change Biology, warns that there is a growing number of species – including over 200 species of commercial importance – eating plastic.
Matthew Savoca was collecting data on plastic ingestion by seabirds for his PhD when he became interested in uncovering ecological traits linked to increased consumption. Now, as a postdoctoral research fellow at the Hopkins Marine Station, he has conducted one of the most comprehensive analyses of plastic ingestion on fish ever performed.
“Fish are a really good species to track the flow of plastic pollution through marine ecosystems,” said Savoca, who is lead author of the paper. “Now, we are showing the numbers in ways they haven’t been shown before. No previous studies have looked across all of this research for broad patterns and drivers.”
March 27, 2019 — Aquaculture entrepreneurs and researchers seeking capital for ventures and technologies supporting sustainable seafood or the marine environment are encouraged to join a Fish 2.0 workshop at the University of North Carolina Wilmington’s Marine Campus on 23-24 April.
The event is part of the Fish 2.0 initiative and established businesses from the US South Atlantic coast (Maryland, DC, Virginia, North and South Carolina, Georgia, and the Atlantic coast of Florida) involved in seafood supply chains, climate resilience technologies, or seafood production, including aquaculture, wild harvesting or trade are eligible to apply at no cost.
“If you know of technologies being commercialised at universities or ventures getting started in your state, please forward this message. We want to help those entrepreneurs meet investors that can fund these important ventures,” say Fish 2.0’s organisers.
Fish 2.0 is a year-long global programme that connects entrepreneurs with business-building resources and a network of investors and innovators that are shaping the future of fisheries, aquaculture, and the marine ecosystem.
March 26, 2019 — Overfishing is rapidly pushing many of the world’s sharks and tunas toward extinction. The world’s fastest known shark, the shortfin mako, for example, was recently uplisted to endangered on the IUCN Red List, its decline mostly attributed to overfishing.
But researchers are only beginning to figure out where and when people fish them the most. Now, a new study has some answers.
By analyzing the trails of more than 900 fishing vessels and more than 800 sharks and tunas in the northeast Pacific, researchers have identified regions where the two tend to overlap. This information, researchers say, can be used to manage fisheries, especially in the high seas, the swaths of ocean that lie beyond the jurisdiction of individual countries.
“These fish [sharks and tunas] may travel thousands of miles every year, crossing international boundaries and management jurisdictions,” said Timothy White, lead author of the study and a graduate student in biology at Stanford University, California. “In order to sustainably manage them, we need to know where they migrate and where people fish them, but this info is surprisingly difficult to gather for sharks and tunas of the open ocean.”
August 31, 2018 — From collecting field samples inside the ocean’s frozen ice pack to analyzing satellite images in the comfort of his Stanford office, Kevin Arrigo has been trying to figure out how the world’s rapidly thinning ice impacts polar food chains. Arrigo, a professor of Earth system science at Stanford School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences, found that while melting ice threatens to amplify environmental issues globally, ice sheet retreat can provide much-needed food in local ecosystems.
Through this work, Arrigo discovered that thinning ice at the poles can alleviate polar food deserts by extending phytoplankton blooms. However, the silver lining associated with melting ice cannot make up for imminent threats, such as rising sea levels, associated with unchecked glacial shrinkage.
Arrigo, who is also the Donald and Donald M. Steel Professor in Earth Sciences, spoke with Stanford Report about his work on polar phytoplankton blooms and discussed whether recent news about sea ice breaking up suggests we’ve reached a tipping point.
What have you learned about how glacial melt impacts food chains in the extreme environments of the poles?
It turns out that when glaciers form, they accumulate particles and dust that contain essential nutrients like iron, on which all living things depend for survival. As glaciers melt, they add nutrients to the ocean and fertilize the local ecosystem. In Greenland and Antarctica, the ocean is short on iron, so melting glaciers make up for the lack of iron.
Read the full story at Stanford News
June 3, 2018 — New computer-generated daily maps will help fishermen locate the most productive fishing spots in near real time while warning them where they face the greatest risk of entangling sea turtles, marine mammals, and other protected species. Scientists developed the maps, the products of a system called EcoCast, to help reduce accidental catches of protected species in fishing nets.
Funded primarily by NASA with support from NOAA, California Sea Grant, and Stanford University, EcoCast was developed by NOAA Fisheries scientists and academic partners with input from fishermen and managers.
Using the swordfish fishery as an example, EcoCast incorporates data from tagged animals, remote sensing satellites, and fisheries observers to help predict concentrations of target species (broadbill swordfish) and three protected species (leatherback turtle, blue shark and California sea lion).
EcoCast will help fishermen, managers, scientists, and others understand in near real-time where fishing vessels have the highest probability of catching targeted species and where there is risk of catching protected species. In doing so, EcoCast aims to improve the economic and environmental sustainability of fisheries that sometimes inadvertently catch and kill sensitive species.