May 13, 2022 — The International Seafood Sustainability Foundation (ISSF) has released its 2021 annual report, which this year it titled “Transparent Accountability Across Tuna Fisheries.”
SSF is committed to achieving sustainable tuna fisheries through work with industry partners and advocacy appeals directed at regional fishery management organizations (RFMOs).
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April 28, 2022 — Taiwanese fishing representatives have issued a joint statement to protest the treatment they have received from non-governmental organizations including the Seafood Working Group and Greenpeace.
The Taiwan Deepsea Tuna Longline Boatowners and Exporters Association, Taiwan Squid Fishery Association, Taiwan Tuna Purse Seiners Association, Taiwan Tuna Longline Association, and Distant Fisheries Youth Association said the industry’s continuing efforts on labor are “simply ignored” by the campaign groups.
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April 13, 2022 — Bumble Bee Seafoods is debuting a “Good For You” advertising campaign designed to “recruit the next generation of tuna lovers by dispelling category perceptions and inspiring new usage ideas,” the San Diego, California, U.S.A.-based company said in a press release.
The company’s new campaign “offers a simple, memorable expression of not only the culinary and nutrition story behind tuna, but also an acknowledgement of the amazing authenticity behind the people who love what tuna does for them.”
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April 8, 2022 — The representative body for the Taiwanese tuna industry has criticized the decision by an American NGO to take a case against a Taiwan-based tuna processor instead of collaborating with government and industry on solutions.
Global Labor Justice – International Labor Rights Forum (GLJ-ILRF) filed suit against San Diego, California, U.S.A.-based Bumble Bee Seafood – a major tuna brand and subsidiary of Fong Chun Formosa Fishery Company (FCF), a Taiwan-based seafood trader and fishing company – over what GLJ ILRF said were its “false and deceptive” marketing claims made by Bumble bee that it sources its tuna through a “fair and safe supply chain.”
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March 29, 2022 — Bumble Bee Seafood “adamantly disagrees” with claims made in a new lawsuit that the supplier and its owner, Kaohsiung, Taiwan-based FCF Co., use forced labor and have inadequate worker-safety standards.
The company “adamantly disagrees with the allegations made in the lawsuit and will defend ourselves,” the San Diego, California, U.S.A.-based tuna firm said in a statement to SeafoodSource. “We continue to work within our supply chain, with others in the tuna industry and through the Seafood Task Force to make the responsible recruitment and treatment of all workers an ongoing top priority.”
March 29, 2022 — Launching the first ever national rip current forecast model, creating high-resolution sea ice information to improve navigation, and using artificial intelligence to process marine mammal calls: These are just a few of NOAA’s many notable scientific accomplishments from the past year. The newly released 2021 NOAA Science Report includes more than 60 stories that represent a selection of NOAA’s 2021 research and development accomplishments across the range of NOAA’s mission. Some of NOAA’s biggest science accomplishments from 2021 include the following 4 stories:
1. Looking at how climate change could impact West Coast fisheries
The “Future Seas” project is a collaborative effort that uses models to explore potential impacts of climate change on West Coast fisheries and evaluate strategies for managing those impacts. This year, the team of scientists completed detailed projections of West Coast ocean conditions out to the year 2100 and used them to project potential climate-driven changes in the distributions and landings of Pacific sardine and albacore tuna in the California Current System, an ocean current that moves southward along the West Coast of North America. Thanks to the Future Seas project, scientists can now provide information and advice on climate resilience to West Coast fishing communities, which helps them better prepare for the effects of climate change.
March 29, 2022 — The recently released International Seafood Sustainability Foundation’s (ISSF) “Status of the Stocks” report found the world’s commercial tuna catch is increasingly being sourced from stocks that are not at healthy levels of abundance.
This twice-yearly report by the ISSF – a global coalition including seafood industry members and scientific and environmental organizations that promote science-based initiatives for long-term ocean health – provides the results for the most-recent scientific assessments of 23 separate stocks of major commercial tuna species. The stocks include six albacore, four bigeye, four bluefin, five skipjack, and four yellowfin tuna species.
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March 23, 2022 — Norway-based marine and energy insurance firm Hydor has decided to put an end to its contract covering a fleet of ships that were found participating in illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) tuna fishing, the Environmental Justice Foundation (EJF) reported.
The fleet of three ships – currently named Israr 1, 2, and 3 – has operated in the Atlantic for years and was blacklisted in December 2021 by the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT), following an EJF report detailing the fleet’s illicit activities. EJF’s attention was first drawn to the fleet when satellite monitoring of the vessels’ movements demonstrated they were long-lining for tuna without registering with ICCAT, the regional fishery management organization that oversees the Atlantic tuna-fishing sector.
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March 4, 2022 — The Slope Sea off the Northeast United States is a major spawning ground for Atlantic bluefin tuna (Thunnus thynnus), a new paper affirms. This finding likely has important implications for population dynamics and the survival of this fish, according to the paper, “Support for the Slope Sea as a major spawning ground for Atlantic bluefin tuna: evidence from larval abundance, growth rates, and particle-tracking simulations,” published in the Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences.
“Overall, our results provide important supporting evidence that the Slope Sea is a major spawning ground that is likely to be important for population dynamics,” the paper states. Spawning in the Slope Sea “may offer the species additional resilience in the face of both harvesting and climate change,” the paper adds.
The paper presents larval evidence supporting the recognition of the Slope Sea as a major spawning ground, including that larvae collected in the Slope Sea grew at the same rate as larvae collected in the Gulf of Mexico, indicating that this region is good larval habitat.
“In comparison to everything else we know about this species, the Slope Sea is a perfectly good place to be born as a larva,” said lead author Christina Hernández, who was a doctoral student in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) – Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) Joint Program in Oceanography/Applied Ocean Science and Engineering at the time of the study.
Read the full story at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
February 11, 2022 — Current Foods’ addition of plant-based tuna and salmon analogs and a new partnership between Above Foods and Umiami represent the latest plant-based seafood analog offerings available in the North American market.
San Francisco, California, U.S.A.-based Current Foods, formerly Kuleana, is rebranding itself as it enters the direct-to-consumer market with sushi-grade, plant-based, and ready-to-eat seafood.
Read the full story at SeafoodSource