Tag: overfishing
-
Taking the pulse of ocean life
We tend to keep track of things we think are important—blood pressure, how many calories are in that muffin, hurricane tracks, stock prices, celebrity rehab details. But sometime we don’t know what’s important until it’s too late, and that ignorance can come back to bite us. Hence the annual physical exams that are standard in…
-
Drew Harvell at work in the coral triangle
My friend, collaborator and post-doc advisor Dr Drew Harvell of Cornell University has published three articles in the New York Times Scientists at Work series about her current trip to the coral triangle. In her Feb 1 post Drew describes her visit to the reefs of Papua, some pristine and diverse, some ravaged by dynamite fishing:…
-
Monbiot on paper parks
UK’s George Monbiot wrote about the absurdity that is the UK’s marine reserve system in his column in the Guardian recently (HT to Helen). It is great to see George join a tiny but growing number of voices criticizing “MPAs” (AKA Marine Protected Areas) as a solution to overfishing and other ocean problems. The UK’s marine reserves…
-
Saving the world’s fisheries
A new editorial from the WaPost: THE WORLD’S WATERS are dangerously overfished, threatening the health and livelihood of millions across the planet. A new study from consulting firm California Environmental Associates, part of which appeared in the journal Science last week, estimates that “over 40 percent of fisheries have crashed or are overfished, producing economic losses…
-
Seafood mislabeling in Belize
This post was co-authored with Courtney Cox, a PhD student in my lab at UNC, studying fisheries management and reef resilience in Belize. Our paper on seafood mislabeling in Belize is out in Conservation Letters (here). This paper is the fist of several from our project designed to evaluate the effectiveness of Belize’s national ban on…
-
Extinction happens
This is why we think hunting tiger sharks and other top predators and large sea critter is not cool. They can and do so easily disappear forever. The excerpt below about the extinction of Stellers Sea Cow on Bering island in the mid-18th century is from The Unnatural History of the Sea by Callum Roberts. I…
-
Five things I didn’t know about the ocean
My review of Professor Callum Roberts’ new book The Ocean of Life has just come out in Toronto’s Globe and Mail. This is the follow up to his first book An unnatural history of the sea (it was one of the Five Books I picked for the Browser) – it dives into the history of how we’ve stripped…
-
Catch shares
This is a repost of several articles by Mark Gibson from Breaching the Blue: A new study evaluates the impacts of catch share management in the U.S. and Canada, finding: [C]atch shares result in environmental improvements, economic improvements, and a mixture of changes in social performance, relative to the race for fish under traditional management. Environmentally, compliance with total…
-
Atlantic Bluefin Tuna
You Wouldn’t Eat a Tiger, So Why Would You Eat Endangered Bluefin Tuna?
-
Marine reserves gather steam
This is a nice piece in the WaPost by the wonderful Juliet Eilperin about two new Marine Protected Area networks. One inaccuracy is that the piece conflates marine reserves and Marine Protected Areas (MPAs). Marine reserves are a sub-category of MPA in which no extraction or other harmful activities are allowed. I also remain very concerned about…