Tag: food
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Shrimp farming: a green (blue) future?
I love shrimp. Not just as sources of surprising insights into the evolution of social life. They’re tasty too. Too much so in fact. Despite my attempts to fit into a dainty little ecological footprint, I’ve always found it difficult to pass up shrimp on the menu despite the fact that they’re generally considered by…
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Forum on fish, food, and people
Editor’s note: The following discussion, which more than one participant called “extraordinary”, began after Ray Hilborn of the University of Washington published an op-ed “Let us eat fish” in the New York Times on 14 April 2011, and John Bruno of the University of North Carolina (and my Co-Editor at SeaMonster) replied here at SeaMonster.…
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Holy Mackerel!
[. . . I’m tempted to add “Batman!”, but that would really show my age.] Where on earth do such expressions come from? I can’t answer that, but at least we can now sleuth out the evolution of the word mackerel itself, thanks to some crack detective work by Jim Gleick in his new book…
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Let us eat (other people’s) fish
Should Americans really eat more fish? In a recent op-ed in the NYT titled “Let Us Eat Fish” Dr. Ray Hilborn, a fisheries scientist at the University of Washington, argued we should. Ray thinks that because some of the hundreds of fish populations harvested in U.S. waters appear to be recovering and approaching levels that…
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Ocean friendly seafood? There’s an app (or two) for that.
So you’re out on a date at your favorite little romantic seafood bistro, looking at the menu with whatever sanitized name the marketers have just invented for Patagonian toothfish or slimefish or whatever. With all the conflicting information out there, how does the average civilian choose what to order without pillaging the ocean? Fortunately, technology…
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A letter from your mother on Earth Day
Hello to all of my human inhabitants, This is your mother, the Earth. Yes that’s right, the planet you live on. I thought I’d get in touch with a message in honor of my special day (thank you, BTW, I never miss an excuse for a good party), and the SeaMonster was kind enough to…
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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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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…