Tag: fishing
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The fish that launched a thousand ships, then disappeared
A recent analysis clinches the growing evidence that the North Atlantic is a unique region of the world ocean, and helps explain both its special vulnerability to fishing, and perhaps also its fundamental importance in the historical expansion of European influence around the globe. This is a big fish tale. Scientifically speaking, the body size…
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Japanese seafood’s fine-unless you eat it
A series of news outlets are reporting that sampled fish near the crippled Fukushima reactor are showing high levels of radioactivity, which isn’t too surprising since workers at the plant dump over 1000 tons of contaminated water into the ocean Monday night. Excellent. The findings are stoking fears in seafood markets and restaurants around the…
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Have we reached “peak fish”?
During the 20th century fishing became a heavy industry, expanding rapidly to the global scale, and fishing pressure now appears to be near—if not beyond—the ocean’s capacity to provide. The Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (FAO) recently reported that “the maximum wild capture fisheries potential from the world’s oceans has probably been…
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Fish Know to Avoid the Spear
A successfully speared medium sized Oriental Sweetlips Plectorhinchus orientalis. This is towards the upper end of the size range of fishes typically targeted by Papua New Guinean spear fishers. Fish are not as dumb as people sometimes think: marine scientists have found that fish that are regularly hunted with spearguns are much more wary and…
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Who pays for overfishing? Poor people in Africa
The pervasive detrimental impacts of overfishing on marine life and ecosystems have been widely publicized in recent years, ratcheting up calls for stricter regulation and protection. A counter-argument commonly heard in debates on this issue is that fishing (like coal mining, oil drilling, pillaging of old-growth forests, etc.) provides essential jobs, revenue, and food, particularly…
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Surprisingly few white sharks off California coast
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5poHfnS1kMA&[/youtube] The first rigorous scientific estimate of white shark numbers in the northeast Pacific Ocean suggests there are far fewer white sharks off central California than biologists had expected. The details reported in the journal Biology Letters offer the best estimate among the world’s three known white shark populations (the others are in Australia/New Zealand and…