Daniel Pauly Archives - Saving Seafood

Scientists pen letter to Congress urging SIMP expansion

December 16, 2021 — More than 100 scientists signed a letter sent to Congress on Monday, 13 December, urging lawmakers to ensure that all seafood products imported into the United States are caught using legal means.

Illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing is often associated with human trafficking and other human rights abuses, and distant-water fishing forces vessel owners and operators to extend trips to “achieve a sizeable catch,” the university professors, research fellows, and scientists claimed in the two-page letter. In order to get that kind of catch, some operators will use forced labor and harvest fishing stocks beyond allowable limits, they alleged.

Read the full story at SeafoodSource

Billions in fishing subsidies finance social, ecological harm, report finds

July 7, 2021 — A new report shows that the world’s top fishing nations are using subsidies worth billions of dollars to exploit the high seas and the waters of other nations, including some of the world’s least-developed countries.

Published by researchers at the University of British Columbia and supported by the NGO Oceana, the report takes a shrewd look at “harmful fishing subsidies,” payments made by governments that allow fishing fleets to operate beyond their normal capacity. The researchers found that 10 countries — China, Japan, South Korea, Russia, the U.S.A., Thailand, Taiwan, Spain, Indonesia and Norway — spent more than $15.3 billion on harmful fishing subsidies in 2018, which has likely contributed to a number of social, economic and ecological issues.

About 60% ($9.2 billion) of these harmful fishing subsidies used by these 10 nations were spent on domestic fishing, while 35% ($5.4 billion) was spent on traveling long distances to fish in the waters of 116 other nations. The remaining 5% ($800 million) was spent on fishing in the high seas, which are parts of the ocean beyond any nation’s jurisdiction.

China was found to be the top provider of harmful fishing subsidies, worth about $5.9 billion, followed by Japan at $2.1 billion and the European Union at $2 billion.

Kathryn Matthews, chief scientist at Oceana, says the report shows the scale and magnitude of harmful fishing subsidies, which can transfer the risk of overfishing from one place to another.

Read the full story at Mongabay

Seaspiracy’s lasting impact on sustainable seafood businesses

April 21, 2021 — With each passing day, Seaspiracy becomes increasingly irrelevant, buried in the never-ending content cue of the world’s largest streaming platform. The last month has been full of fact checks, flame wars, and funding accusations. Though it brought out the worst of everyone on social media, it brought the marine science and stakeholder community together. There is a clear consensus that the film was awful. Even Ray Hilborn and Daniel Pauly agree!

I sneer at the filmmaker’s silly “fact page,” a regurgitation of each false claim in the film listed in chronological order. But I acknowledge—the joke’s on us. The filmmakers had no intention of presenting facts or having an honest discussion about ocean health; they sought to create a piece of horror entertainment by slandering the seafood industry. And they succeeded. For those of us in the sustainable seafood world, the cut is deep and unlikely to heal soon.

Sustainable seafood businesses didn’t deserve this. Those referring to the best available science, making public sourcing policies, exercising due diligence in their supply chains, and seeking certifications are disproportionately impacted. The film concluded that there is no such thing as sustainable seafood, making liars and cheats of those seeking it. A seafood company that makes no sustainability claims is now less likely to receive negative feedback than one that does.

Herein lies the most disgusting part of this film: it disincentivizes sustainability. Sustainable seafood products are often more expensive than unsustainable alternatives, and studies suggest consumers are not willing to pay a premium for environmentally sustainable seafood. Attempting to source seafood sustainably costs time, money, and perseverance. Like brushing your teeth, you can’t just do it once and be considered clean. A diligent seafood sustainability program requires regular re-assessments and constant attention, or else plaque will accumulate. Commitment to sustainability prohibits a fisherman from fishing in a marine protected area even though it might be full of valuable fish; it stops a chef from putting a popular item back on the menu; it requires a mid-size grocery store chain to invest valuable resources into a seafood certification program each year.

Read the full story at Sustainable Fisheries UW

Research shows inefficient fishing costs global companies over $51bn annually

November 28, 2018 — An international research initiative has calculated that fishing companies worldwide are losing between $51-$83 billion in unrealized economic benefits every year due to overexploitation and underperforming fish stocks.

According to research undertaken by experts at the organization Sea Around Us, companies are spending too much for the fish, revenue and profits that they ultimately generate.

The organization’s latest report studied menhaden fisheries off the coast of the US and anchovies off the west shores of Peru. In both cases, Sea Around Us believes that profits could be substantially increased if stocks had been fished more intelligently.

“We found that Atlantic and Gulf menhaden stocks were in a healthy state and were being exploited below sustainable levels. By not augmenting their catches the two largest companies targeting them were losing $50 million in additional revenues and $12 million in profits,” lead author Tim Cashion said in a statement.

Meanwhile, Sea Around Us identified that Peru could also have increased its annual revenues by $3m – $9.1m from 2011 to 2015 if anchovy stocks had been allowed to recover in that time.

Read the full story at Undercurrent News

Could A Ban On Fishing In International Waters Become A Reality?

September 14, 2018 — The jury is in on marine reserves: They work. Research has repeatedly shown that fish numbers quickly climb following well-enforced fishing bans, creating tangible benefits for fishers who work the surrounding waters. In fact, many experts believe fishing will only be sustainable if marine reserves are expanded significantly.

That’s why some activists and scientists are now discussing the idea of creating a marine reserve so big it would cover most of the ocean. Specifically, they want fishing banned in international waters.

Also called the high seas, international waters include all parts of the ocean 200 miles or more from sovereign land. That’s about 58 percent of the ocean’s surface. In this largely unregulated area, fishing boats use voluminous trawl nets, longlines miles in length, and other industrial gear to catch migrating tunas and billfishes, sharks, and seafloor species like toothfish, usually sold as Chilean sea bass.

The environmental impact of these fisheries can be devastating. Deep-sea trawling destroys seafloor habitats, including ancient corals, while killing many creatures that are ultimately discarded. Meanwhile, the total contribution to the world’s food supply from these fisheries is negligible, catch records have shown.

Proponents say a fishing ban could be an effective way to protect depleted species and ultimately create more fish in coastal waters, where fishers could still deploy hooks and nets.

Read the full story at NPR

Mistake in fisheries statistics shows false increase in catches

February 7, 2018 — Countries’ improvements to their fisheries statistics have been contributing to the false impression that humanity is getting more and more fish from the ocean when, in reality, global marine catches have been declining on average by around 1.2 million tonnes per year since 1996.

A new study in Marine Policy explains why the reconstructed catch data of the Sea Around Us show declining fish catches, while the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations claims that catches have been more or less ‘stable’ since the 1990s. The Sea Around Us is a research initiative at the University of British Columbia and the University of Western Australia.

The problem – say authors Dirk Zeller and Daniel Pauly- occurs as an inadvertent side effect of well-intentioned efforts by countries to improve their national data monitoring and reporting systems. As they include new information, for example of a previously unmonitored or poorly-monitored fishery, region or fleet, these new data add additional catches to those of already monitored sectors, thus creating the impression of a growing trend.

But such upward tendencies in catches do not match reality in most countries because often national statistical systems do not correct their new numbers retroactively. This incidental by-product of updates in fisheries data collection systems is what Zeller and Pauly call a “presentist bias,” which means that the emphasis is on the ‘present’ at the expense of the ‘past.’

“In our paper, we use the example of Mozambique where officials reported that small-scale catches ‘grew’ by 800 per cent from 2003 to 2004. This is incorrect. What happened was that the small-scale sector was massively under-represented in the reported data for the longest time and when a new reporting scheme was put in place in the early 2000s, improved catch data by the always-present subsistence and artisanal fisheries were added. A very similar amount of fish was caught in previous years, it was just not registered in the reported data,” says Zeller, who is the lead author of the study and head of the Sea Around Us – Indian Ocean at the University of Western Australia.

Read the full story at PHYS

Nils E. Stolpe/FishNet USA: “Fish Wars” or a Regime Shift in Ocean Governance?

October 2, 2017 — The reasons for Big Oil’s (now more accurately Big Energy’s) focus on fisheries – and on demonizing fishing and fishermen – has been fairly obvious since a coalition of fishermen and environmentalists successfully stopped energy exploration on Georges Bank in the early 80s. Using a handful of ocean oriented ENGOs as their agents, the Pew Charitable Trusts and other “charitable” trusts funded a hugely expensive campaign that the domestic fishing industry is still suffering from, but that campaign has paid off handsomely to the entities that participated in or funded it.

However, the entry of Philadelphia’s Lenfest Foundation into the fray, particularly considering that operational control was delegated to Pew, appeared to put the participation of other foundations with roots in the high tech area in a different light. Packard, Moore and Lenfest all working together with Pew et al to scuttle the public image and “revolutionize” the financial and social underpinnings of an entire industry in an apparently coordinated way started to make some sense (read more here).

But my thinking on this was further crystallized after reading a recent article in the New York Times. From the February 22, 2016 Fishnet:

“The authors (of the most recent Daniel Pauly assault on commercial fishing) acknowledge, and it will probably come as no surprise to most readers, “that The Pew Charitable Trusts, Philadelphia, funded the Sea Around Us from 1999 to 2014, during which the bulk of the catch reconstruction work was performed.” However, it might be news that “since mid-2014, the Sea Around Us has been funded mainly by The Paul G. Allen Family Foundation.” If anyone wonders why one of the founders of Microsoft might be interested in supporting research by Daniel Pauly, from an article in the NY Times last week – Microsoft Plumbs Ocean’s Depths to Test Underwater Data Center)

“REDMOND, Wash. — Taking a page from Jules Verne, researchers at Microsoft believe the future of data centers may be under the sea. Microsoft has tested a prototype of a self-contained data center that can operate hundreds of feet below the surface of the ocean, eliminating one of the technology industry’s most expensive problems: the air-conditioning bill. Today’s data centers, which power everything from streaming video to social networking and email, contain thousands of computer servers generating lots of heat. When there is too much heat, the servers crash. Putting the gear under cold ocean water could fix the problem. It may also answer the exponentially growing energy demands of the computing world be-cause Microsoft is considering pairing the system either with a turbine or a tidal energy system to generate electricity. The effort, code-named Project Natick, might lead to strands of giant steel tubes linked by fiber optic cables placed on the seafloor. Another possibility would suspend containers shaped like jelly beans beneath the surface to capture the ocean current with turbines that generate electricity.”

Of course this needs to be coupled with Microsoft’s commitment to the future of “cloud computing” (for those readers who have successfully avoided advanced nerdhood up until now, the “cloud” is just a lot of web-connected servers housed in what are called server farms. Server farms are becoming increasingly expensive to operate shoreside – see the NY Times article linked above) and do a Google search on “Microsoft cloud future” to see where the tech industry thinks Microsoft is heading vis a vis cloud computing.

Is it possible that in the near future we’ll be reading foundation-funded research reports from our neighbors in British Columbia “proving” that submerged server farms put in place by the well-known Redmond conservationists provide much needed shelter for a myriad of marine creatures that are threatened by those rapacious fisher-men? Or that Marine Protected Areas are a really logical place to put those submerged servers?”

If you haven’t fully embraced the high-tech, internet-based wonders that are now easily and affordably available to virtually all of us – how about a Brita water purifier that will automatically order another filter before the old one needs replacing? – the major impetus for this seems to be to get folks to spend money without consciously deciding to do so. Propping this all up, making it possible, is “cloud computing” enabling you to receive a Brita filter and to get Amazon and Brita handsomely paid for getting it to you without you being involved.

With the increase in web-connected, web-enabled, web-anythinged appliances, processes, monitors, alarms, lighting and who knows what else in the future, and in hi-definition video and music streaming, a rapid growth in the capacity of the so-called cloud, which is going to become increasingly crowded, is guaranteed. That means that the demand for server farms will be increasing as well – and the closer those server farms are to the demand (population centers), the more efficient they will be.

As the Microsoft interest clearly demonstrates, alternatives to land based server farms in close proximity to population centers are going to become a high priority, and the only alternative is going to be siting them in the ocean – which offers the additional benefit of significantly reducing, or perhaps eliminating, cooling costs.

These sub-surface server farms will be as compatible with fishing as offshore power generation or the petroleum industry are. Would there be a more rational solution to what has already become a significant problem, given hundreds of billions of dollars in the bank, than for these high tech industries that are committed to a future in the oceans, than to marginalize fishermen.

Read the full opinion piece at FishNet USA

Climate Change May Shrink the World’s Fish

A new study suggests warming sea temperatures could result in smaller fish sizes.

August 22, 2017 — Warming temperatures and loss of oxygen in the sea will shrink hundreds of fish species—from tunas and groupers to salmon, thresher sharks, haddock and cod—even more than previously thought, a new study concludes.

Because warmer seas speed up their metabolisms, fish, squid and other water-breathing creatures will need to draw more oxygen from the ocean. At the same time, warming seas are already reducing the availability of oxygen in many parts of the sea.

A pair of University of British Columbia scientists argue that since the bodies of fish grow faster than their gills, these animals eventually will reach a point where they can’t get enough oxygen to sustain normal growth.

“What we found was that the body size of fish decreases by 20 to 30 percent for every 1 degree Celsius increase in water temperature,” says author William Cheung, director of science for the university’s Nippon Foundation—Nereus Program.

These changes, the scientists say, will have a profound impact on many marine food webs, upending predator-prey relationships in ways that are hard to predict.

“Lab experiments have shown that it’s always the large species that will become stressed first,” says lead author Daniel Pauly, a professor at the university’s Institute for the Ocean and Fisheries, and principal investigator for the Sea Around Us. “Small species have an advantage, respiration-wise.”

Still, while many scientists applaud the discovery, not all agree that Pauly’s and Cheung’s work supports their dramatic findings. The study was published today in the journal Global Change Biology.

Read the full story at National Geographic

NILS STOLPE: Are You Getting the Idea That If You’re a Fisherman Daniel Pauly Isn’t On Your Side?

February 22, 2016 — The following opinion was first published by Fishery Nation:

“… The crisis in the world’s fisheries is less about scientific proof than about attitude and political will. And the world’s fish need a dynamic, high-profile political champion like a Bono or Mandela to give finned creatures the public profile of cute and furry ones.” (Daniel Pauly in Hooked on fishing, and we’re heading for the bottom, says scientist, a 02/17/06 press release by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council

This quote by the Pew Charitable Trusts’ premier fisheries researcher says just about all that needs to be said about the ongoing anti-fishing campaign that they have been financing, along with a handful of other mega-foundations, to convince anyone who is willing to listen that, in spite of a dearth of compelling scientific evidence supporting this strum und drang , the world’s oceans are – and have been – facing a crisis brought about because of the depredations of commercial fishermen.

Where are the Kardashian’s when Pauly really needs them?

Just imagine a scientist, any scientist, willing to publicly discount scientific proof and instead embrace the cachet of celebrity to sell his message of doom and gloom in the oceans. And then imagine multi-billion dollar “charitable” foundations eager to support him in these efforts, all in the face of rigorous opposition from well-established scientists who dismiss this rabble rousing for what it is; full of sound and fury but signifying not very much at all.

To help in putting his most recent round of pronouncements on how bad fishing is supposed to be in the proper perspective, I’ve highlighted – because “lowlighted” isn’t yet an accepted term, but there’s always hope – a number of his sky is falling predictions that I’d consider on a par with his “we don’t need sound science, we need high profile personages” plea up above.

The attack of the mud trails!

Back in 2007 Pauly and another researcher generated an inordinate amount of publicity by releasing some satellite images of “mud trails” caused by shrimp trawlers fishing over the Yangtze River delta off China’s coast. Said Pauly of these images “think of the story about China’s Great Wall being the only human artefacts visible from space. Now we can add the mudtrails of trawlers. But not only trawlers from China – from all over the world.” Note that in 2007 Google Earth had been available for several years. Contrary to Pauly’s contention, Google Earth made available via satellite imagery many millions of “human artefacts,” including the four skylights on my house and the patio furniture on the patio. But we wouldn’t want anything like accuracy interfering with a good story, would we?

Pauly’s mud trails (identified only as “satellite photo”), a portion of the Great Wall of China and Casa Stolpe (both from Google Earth)

As far as Pauly’s supposed damage by these mud trails, ten minutes of “research” with Google revealed that the Yangtze River delta contains 500 billion tons of sediment that ranges from three to one hundred and thirty feet deep. Obviously any critters living over or in this sediment are evolutionarily equipped to handle suspended – or resuspended – sediment, and the little bit extra that is kicked up by trawlers isn’t going to amount to a tinker’s damn to any of them. But then again, how effective would this level of crisis mongering be if it was constrained by reality?

And we can’t forget Pauly’s theory of ugly fish

In his article Aquacalypse Now (New Republic, 09/28/09) Pauly wrote that when the oceans had been stripped of the larger, more visually appealing fish, “boats began to catch fish that were smaller and uglier.” While, given any familiarity with the history of seafood consumption at all, I couldn’t imagine his “Bono” or “Mandela” buying into this one, it appears as if nothing like reality is going to stand in the way of a tale Pauly is set on telling. Picture sea cucumbers, oysters, monkfish, sardines, whitebait, eels, lobsters, clams, crabs, palolo worms, geoducks, etc. All of these, and many other small or “ugly” fish and shellfish have been consumed by hungry humans for generations, and I doubt that anyone – other than Daniel Pauly and his associates – have ever decided not to eat any of them because they’re too small or not pretty enough.

Fishing down the food chain? Fishing up the food chain? How about fishing it sideways?

In 1998 Pauly made his notorious, and probably his most controversial, pronouncement of imminent ocean doom due to fishing. To wit, fishermen had caught too many of the top predators in the world’s oceans and as a consequence were catching fish and shellfish lower down on the food chain, and that without more controls on fishermen we were destined to a future with oceans inhabited by nothing but jellyfish and plankton. In Issues For Debate in Environmental Management he is quoted “we are eating bait and moving on to plankton and jellyfish…. My kids will tell their children “’eat your jellyfish.’” The truth of the matter is that if his children lived in Japan or China or in a bunch of other places in Asia they might be telling their kids to “eat your jellyfish” at this very moment.

Needless to say, Pauly is once again attempting to make the commonplace a harbinger of his supposed imminent “oceans crisis.” In fact, dried jellyfish have been a staple of Asian cuisines for millennia. According to Jellyfish fisheries in Southeast Asia by M. Omori and E. Nakano (Hydrobiologia 451: 19-26, 2001) “a few large jellyfish in the order Rhizostemeae constitute an important food in Chinese cooking. For more than 1700 years they have been exploited along the coasts of China.” This would appear to make Pauly’s belief in the evils of modern fishing based on jellyfish consumption somewhat untenable. It’s highly unlikely that commercial fishermen – or whatever they might have been called back in 200 Anno Domini or thereabouts – had fished down their food chain, so that sort of leaves out jellyfish consumption as an indicator of much of anything other than a desire to eat jellyfish. But it appears as if something as ancient and as culturally acceptable as eating jellyfish can be distorted to reinforce his crisis mongering, he’s going to use it.

(see Ray Hilborn’s Myths – Fishing down food webs at https://rayhblog.wordpress.com/myths/.)

Shifting baselines?

In 1995 Pauly wrote “each generation of fisheries scientists accepts as a baseline the stock size and species composition that occurred at the beginning of their careers, and uses this to evaluate changes. When the next generation starts its career, the stocks have further declined, but it is the stocks at that time that serve as a new baseline. The result obviously is a gradual shift of the baseline, a gradual accommodation of the creeping disappearance of resource species, and inappropriate reference points for evaluating economic losses resulting from overfishing, or for identifying targets for rehabilitation measures.” (Anecdotes and the shifting baseline syndrome of fisheries, Postscript in TREE vol 10, no. 10, October 1995.)

It appears that – at least at the time and perhaps still – he believed that fisheries scientists arrived on the scientific scene in discrete generations, once every 25 years (that’s what a human generation is generally accepted to be), to replace the previous generation, and that the new generation discounted everything that the previous generation observed and recorded. As compelling as others of his fables are, on the face of it this seems to make sense. But does it really?

I strongly suspect that if you visit a college/university fisheries department (perhaps the University of British Columbia’s) or a government research facility (perhaps the NOAA/NMFS Northeast Fisheries Science Center in Woods Hole, MA) you won’t find a staff of scientists of similar or identical age, none younger and none older. I sure haven’t. You’ll find scientists and technicians beginning their careers, ending them, and at every stage in between. And those scientists and technicians don’t start from some particular point in amassing new data and coming up with new theories. In spite of Pauly’s contention – because it makes his indictment of modern fisheries science and modern fisheries scientists seem more believable – they base their work on what’s been done before. For example, the bottom trawl surveys performed annually by the Northeast Fisheries Science Center in Woods Hole, MA go back to 1950, spanning most of three generations. But, in spite of Pauly’s contention,, they were certainly not performed and analyzed by three separate and distinct cohorts of scientists and technicians who paid no attention to the survey results obtained prior to when their “generation” took over. The results of these surveys provide the foundation for the assessments of many of the species in our northeast region. Among other things, science – at least science as performed by most scientists but perhaps not by Pauly and his “generation” at UBC – is a continuous process, scientists building on, adding to or subtracting from the work of their predecessors.

But Pauly’s shifting baselines construct demands that this not be the case, so like all of us who at some point in childhood believed that by wishing we could bring Tinker Bell back from wherever fairies went to after exiting Wonderland, he apparently believes – or wants us to believe – that reality actually mirrors the world he has imagined to support his pronouncements.

And as far as his “creeping disappearance of resource species” is concerned, I have yet to learn of any species that has been driven into oblivion by fishing. By creeping development, damming of rivers, habitat degradation and pollution? Yup, but by fishing? The only reasonable response to that would be “show me.” Of course it could be argued that because of fishing the populations of all targeted species are reduced. That’s axiomatic – fishing kills fish. But to refer to that as“creeping disappearance” is just more of the same old same old.

There are, however and unfortunately, some actual, real-life shifting baselines that have nothing to do with fishing that do have a significant impact on finfish and shellfish resources. Primary among them would be those involving the quality of inshore and offshore waters and habitat. Think disappearing wetlands, think household chemicals pollution, think oceans permeated with plastics, think the continuing mass migration of us humans to the coasts. In any instances that are characterized by not enough fish, that lack of fish is far more likely to be a result of these real shifting baselines that it is of too much fishing.

This brings us to Pauly’s most recent exercise in his “blame it all on fishing” campaign

In a short paper in Nature Communications titled Catch reconstructions reveal that global marine fisheries catches are higher than reported and declining Pauly and co-author Dirk Zellar conclude that the world’s fisheries are in even worse shape than had been previously thought because, for a number of plausible seeming reasons, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) has been under-estimating the world’s fish/seafood catch to an increasing degree for the last 30 or so years.

The primary problem with the approach that they used in their analysis is that the harvest of a particular fish stock often has nothing to do with the health of that stock.

As the following graphs show, the only discernable relationship between the monkfish (also known as lotte, one of Dr. Pauley’s so-called “ugly” fish that in spite of his theory to the otherwise has been a staple of Asian and European cuisine for generations) harvest and the monkfish total stock biomass is a fairly dramatic and pronounced inverse one.

I looked at the data for a few other U.S. fisheries and in some the catch went up and down as the biomass varied up and down, some as it varied down and up, and in some there was no relationship between catch and biomass, but, at least with our domestic fisheries, I would be extremely skeptical about making any judgements on the health of a stock based solely (or primarily) on catch statistics.

.It appears as if Pauly and Zellar have fallen into a trap that many people with little or no familiarity with fisheries do. Their methodology assumes that the only thing that drives commercial harvesting is the availability of the particular fish or shellfish being harvested. Nothing could be further from the truth. Fuel costs, foreign exchanges rates, bycatch avoidance, import/export requirements, management measures, competing products, the El Niño/La Niña cycle or the North Atlantic Oscillation (or other decadel or longer duration climatic or oceanic events), natural or man-made catastrophes, other easier/closer/more rewarding alternative fisheries, supply and demand and undoubtedly a number of other factors can and often do impact the level of harvest more than the availability of the particular fish or shellfish.

Dr.Pauly apparently still believes that, in his attempts to conflate science with celebrity to push forward his idea of sound bite fisheries science, that scientific rigor should take a back seat to titillation.

____________________________

The authors acknowledge, and it will probably come as no surprise to most readers, “that The Pew Charitable Trusts, Philadelphia, funded the Sea Around Us from 1999 to 2014, during which the bulk of the catch reconstruction work was performed.” However, it might be news that “since mid-2014, the Sea Around Us has been funded mainly by The Paul G. Allen Family Foundation.” If anyone wonders why one of the founders of Microsoft might be interested in supporting research by Daniel Pauly, from an article in the NY Times last week – Microsoft Plumbs Ocean’s Depths to Test Underwater Data Center (athttp://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/01/technology/microsoft-plumbs-oceans-depths-to-test-underwater-data-center.html):

“REDMOND, Wash. — Taking a page from Jules Verne, researchers at Microsoft believe the future of data centers may be under the sea. Microsof t has tested a prototype of a self-contained data center that can operate hundreds of feet below the surface of the ocean, eliminating one of the technology industry’s most expensive problems: the air-conditioning bill. Today’s data centers, which power everything from streaming video to social networking and email, contain thousands of computer servers generating lots of heat. When there is too much heat, the servers crash. Putting the gear under cold ocean water could fix the problem. It may also answer the exponentially growing energy demands of the computing world because Microsoft is considering pairing the system either with a turbine or a tidal energy system to generate electricity. The effort, code-named Project Natick, might lead to strands of giant steel tubes linked by fiber optic cables placed on the seafloor. Another possibility would suspend containers shaped like jelly beans beneath the surface to capture the ocean current with turbines that generate electricity.”

Of course this needs to be coupled with Microsoft’s commitment to the future of “cloud computing” (for those readers who have successfully avoided advanced Nerdhood up until now, the “cloud” is just a lot of web-connected servers housed in what are called server farms. Server farms are becoming increasingly expensive to operate shoreside – see the NY Times article linked above) and do a Google search on “microsoft cloud future” to see where the tech industry thinks Microsoft is heading vis a vis cloud computing.

Is it possible that in the near future we’ll be reading foundation-funded research reports from our neighbors in British Columbia “proving” that submerged server farms put in place by the well-known Redmond conservationists provide much needed shelter for a myriad of marine creatures that are threatened by those rapacious fishermen? Or that Marine Protected Areas are a really logical place to put those submerged servers?

____________________________

For more background on Daniel Pauly’s science:

http://blog.nature.org/conservancy/2010/11/29/fisheries-apocalypse-ocean-fish-stock-peter-kareiva-ray-hilborn/

http://www.atsea.org/doc/Hilborn%202010%20Science%20Chronicles%202010-11-1.pdf

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/02/130221192734.htm

http://cfooduw.org/do-catch-reconstructions-really-implicate-overfishing/

Read the opinion at Fishery Nation

Daniel Pauly Feeds Media the Wrong Story About Global Fisheries Decline; Other Scientists Object

SEAFOODNEWS.COM by John Sackton – January 25, 2016 — Last week the media was full of a new round of global fishery disaster stories, prompted by an article in Nature Communications by Daniel Pauly & Dirk Zeller affiliated with the Sea Around Us project.

Pauly and Zeller state that FAO global fisheries data has underestimated prior catch, and that therefore if this is taken into account, the decline in fish catch from the peak in the late 1990’s is not 400,000 tons per year, but 1.2 million tons per year.

“Our results indicate that the decline is very strong and is not due to countries fishing less. It is due to countries having fished too much and having exhausted one fishery after another,” said Pauly to the Guardian newspaper. As a result, a new round of handwringing ensued about global overfishing.

But, the facts don’t support Pauly’s interpretation. Catch rates are simply not a suitable measure of fisheries abundance. In fact, declines in catch rates often are due to improvement in fisheries management, not declines in abundance.

Over at cfood, a number of scientists specifically rebutted the premise of Pauly’s article.

Ray Hilborn of the University of Washington says:

This paper tells us nothing fundamentally new about world catch, and absolutely nothing new about the status of fish stocks.

It has long been recognized that by-catch, illegal catch and artisanal catch were underrepresented in the FAO catch database, and that by-catch has declined dramatically.

What the authors claim, and the numerous media have taken up, is the cry that their results show that world fish stocks are in worse shape than we thought. This is absolutely wrong. We know that fish stocks are stable in some places, increasing in others and declining in yet others.

Most of the major fish stocks of the world, constituting 40% of the total catch are scientifically assessed using a mixture of data sources including data on the trends in abundance of the fish stocks, size and age data of the fish caught and other information as available. This paper really adds nothing to our understanding of these major fish stocks.

Another group of stocks, constituting about 20% of global catch, are assessed using expert knowledge by the FAO. These experts use their personal knowledge of these fish stocks to provide an assessment of their status. Estimating the historical unreported catch for these stocks adds nothing to our understanding of these stocks.

For many of the most important stocks that are not assessed by scientific organizations or by expert opinion, we often know a lot about their status. For example; abundance of fish throughout almost all of South and Southeast Asia has declined significantly. This is based on the catch per unit of fishing effort and the size of the individuals being caught. Estimating the amount of other unreported catches does not change our perspective on the status of these stocks.

In the remaining fisheries where we know little about their status, does the fact that catches have declined at a faster rate than reported in the FAO catch data tell us that global fisheries are in worse shape than we thought? The answer is not really. We would have to believe that the catch is a good index of the abundance.

Figure 1 of the Pauly and Zeller paper shows that a number of major fishing regions have not seen declines in catch in the last 10 years. These areas include the Mediterranean and Black Sea, the Eastern Central Atlantic, the Eastern Indian Ocean, the Northwest Pacific and the Western Indian Ocean. Does this mean that the stocks in these areas are in good shape, while areas that have seen significant declines in catch like the Northeast Atlantic, and the Northeast Pacific are in worse shape?

We know from scientific assessments that stocks in the Mediterranean and Eastern Central Atlantic are often heavily overfished – yet catches have not declined.

We know that stocks in the Northeast Pacific are abundant, stable and not overfished, and in the Northeast Atlantic are increasing in abundance. Yet their catch has declined.

Total catch, and declines in catch, are not a good index of the trends in fish stock abundance.

Michael Kaiser of Bangor University commented:

Catch and stock status are two distinct measurement tools for evaluating a fishery, and suggesting inconsistent catch data is a definitive gauge of fishery health is an unreasonable indictment of the stock assessment process. Pauly and Zeller surmise that declining catches since 1996 could be a sign of fishery collapse. While they do acknowledge management changes as another possible factor, the context is misleading and important management efforts are not represented. The moratorium on cod landings is a good example – zero cod landings in the Northwest Atlantic does not mean there are zero cod in the water. Such distinctions are not apparent in the analysis.

Also David Agnew, director of standards for the Marine Stewardship Council, said:

It is noteworthy that the peak of the industrial catches – in the late 1990s/early 2000s – coincidentally aligns with the start of the recovery of many well managed stocks. This point of recovery has been documented previously and particularly relates to the recovery of large numbers of stocks in the north Pacific, the north Atlantic and around Australia and New Zealand, and mostly to stocks that are assessed by analytical models. For stocks that need to begin recovery plans to achieve sustainability, this most often entails an overall reduction in fishing effort, which would be reflected in the reductions in catches seen here. So, one could attribute some of the decline in industrial catch in these regions to a correct management response to rebuild stocks to a sustainable status, although I have not directly analyzed the evidence for this. This is therefore a positive outcome worth reporting.

This opinion piece originally appeared on SeafoodNews.com, a subscription site. It has been reprinted with permission.