Tag: fishing

  • French supermarkets told deep sea fish are NOT sustainable

    One of France’s biggest supermarket chains has been claiming the deep sea fish species it sells are sustainable even though they’re caught by enormously destructive bottom trawlers. A landmark ruling today bans the chain from making any further claims along these lines. It’s hoped that the decision will help put an end to practice of…

  • Good news for the Coral Sea

    It’s been announced that Australian waters will soon be home to the world’s second largest no-take marine reserve. Half a million square kms of the Coral Sea will be out of bounds to the oil & gas industry as well as fisheries – it will include around one third of the coral reefs in the…

  • Oceans at Rio +20

    Next week sees the start of Rio +20. It’s the follow up to the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro and hopes are high among some conservationists and scientists that this time positive change will be made for the oceans. You can keep up to date with the blue issues as they unfold at the…

  • Senegal cancels foreign fishing deals

    Encouraging news emerged last week for West African fisheries as the new government of Senegal announced it has cancelled all deals with foreign fishing companies. All foreign-owned trawlers are to unload their final catch and leave for good.                           The problem of industrial…

  • Sahelian riches

    In the latest installment of my reports form West Africa, I visit my first fishing communities and meet some big ugly molluscs…                     For the past few days I’ve been paying my first visits to fishing communities here in the Gambia. I’ve met and chatted with…

  • Indirect effects of overfishing

    These are the lecture notes from the second lecture of my Marine Ecology course (BIOL 462) at UNC last fall. The first lecture is here. Required readings for this lecture: A recent article by Dr. Emmett Duffy about the hints of a Cod recovery in the north Atlantic and the scientific paper (in Nature) it was based on (here).  Also read…

  • Unravelling the international complications of tuna conservation

    This is a repost from The Conversation by Quentin Hanich, Glenn Sant, and Sonja Fordham.  The eighth meeting of the Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission concluded in Guam on Friday 30 March 2012. Five hundred delegates from more than 40 countries argued for a week about how to reduce overfishing in the Western and Central Pacific tuna fisheries…

  • We need Commercial Seafood Consumer Protection in the US

    The stalled Commercial Seafood Consumer Protection Act got a mention in a nice article about seafood fraud and efforts to curb it in the EU and US. This quote says it all; Although over 80 percent of the seafood consumed in the United States is imported,” the group reports, “the FDA inspects only 2 percent of…

  • Saving a sperm whale

    This astonishing image from the Marine Photobank shows a diver working to free a sperm whale from a tangle of fishing gear. It was taken in 1981 by Alberto Romeo when he and a team of divers from the the Gruppo Ricercatori ed Operatori Subacquei (an underwater association that defends and photographs marine wildlife) came across a sperm…

  • Portfolio effects in Salmon

    by @LizNeeley [vimeo]http://vimeo.com/12239628[/vimeo]