Saving Seafood

Fish are shrinking around the world. Here’s why scientists are worried.

May 6, 2024 — There’s something fishy going on in the water. Across Earth’s oceans, fish are shrinking — and no one can agree why.

It’s happening with salmon near the Arctic Circle and skate in the Atlantic. Nearly three-fourths of marine fish populations sampled worldwide have seen their average body size dwindle between 1960 and 2020, according to a recent analysis.

Overfishing and human-caused climate change are decreasing the size of adult fish, threatening the food supply of more than 3 billion people who rely on seafood as a significant source of protein.

As fish get smaller, there is less meat to cook per catch. So scientists are working to piece together why exactly fish respond to rising ocean temperatures by getting smaller.

“This is a pretty fundamental question,” said Lisa Komoroske, a conservation biologist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. “But we still don’t understand why.”

Read the full story at the Washington Post

NOAA: Overfishing in US hit all-time low in 2023

May 6, 2024 — The number of fish stocks on the U.S. overfishing list decreased by three last year, falling to an all-time low of 21, NOAA said Thursday.

In its annual “Status of the Stocks” report to Congress, the agency also said that 50 fish stocks have now been fully rebuilt since 2000.

In what NOAA described as “a major milestone,” the iconic Snohomish coho salmon became the latest stock to join the rebuilt list last year. The agency said there are more than 20 different stocks of the coho salmon on the West Coast and in Alaska.

Read the full story at E&E News

Overfishing and sustainability

April 24, 2024 — In 2006, a study featured in the New York Times went viral. This study claimed that virtually all fished species would disappear by 2048 due to overfishing if current trends continued.

The claim was met with backlash by fisheries scientists and disproven with many follow up studies. Part of what caused this misunderstanding in 2006 was that fisheries science is very technical and can easily be misunderstood by the general public.

“The U.S. definition of overfishing is anytime your harvest rate is higher than the level that would produce maximum long-term yield,” Ray Hilborn, a professor in the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences (SAFS) at UW, said.

A common misconception is that if a stock is determined as “overfished,” the stock is in danger of extinction. This is only true in very extreme cases, Hilborn explained. The real result of overfishing is depletion of a stock, ultimately leading to lower long-term yields.

Scientists in the field of fisheries management provide advice unique to each wild capture fishery’s objective, which is then used to set catch limits enforced by the federal and state legislature.

Read the full article at The Daily

Overfishing threatens a way of life in the Bahamas

April 6, 2023 — Tereha Davis, whose family has fished for conch from waters around the Bahamas for five generations, remembers when she could walk into the water from the beach and pick up the marine snails from the seabed.

But in recent years, Davis, 49, and conch fishers like her have had to go farther and farther from shore – sometimes as far as 30 miles (48 kilometers) – to find the mollusks that Bahamians eat fried, stewed, smoked and raw and are a pillar of the island nation’s economy and tourism industry.

Scientists, international conservationists and government officials have sounded the alarm that the conch population is fading due to overfishing, and a food central to Bahamians’ diet and identity could cease to be commercially viable in as little as six years.

“When I was a child, we never had to go that far to get conch,” said Davis, speaking at a Freeport market where she sold her catch. “Without conch, what are we supposed to do?”

Read the full article at the Associated Press

Study finds economic pressures the driving force behind overfishing

December 19, 2022 — Overfishing is often seen as a strictly environmental concern, but the issue should be also looked at through an economic lens, according to the new seafood-focused non-governmental organization Accountability.Fish.

Accountability.Fish was created to raise awareness of what it deems as “the under-monitored and murky politics” of regional fisheries management organizations (RFMOs). It seeks to support underrepresented stakeholders in the RFMO decision-making processes, to improve accountability in RFMO decision-making, and to influence RFMOs to take more economically and environmentally sustainable actions.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

WTO agrees deals on Covid vaccines and overfishing

June 20, 2022 — The group of 164 countries spent five days negotiating deals which included pledges on health and food security.

The partial intellectual property waiver deal for coronavirus jabs will allow developing countries to produce and export vaccines.

But it will only last five years, and excludes disease treatments and tests.

Director-general of the WTO Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala said the agreements, reached at a conference in Geneva, would “make a difference to the lives of people around the world”.

“The outcomes demonstrate that the WTO is in fact capable of responding to emergencies of our time,” she added.

The package of the two highest profile deals on the table – aimed at reducing overfishing and sharing Covid vaccine knowledge – was described as “unprecedented” by Ms Okonjo-Iweala.

Read the full story at BBC News

What Makes Mahi Mahi A More Sustainable Seafood Option

June 7, 2022 — Mahi mahi is a fairly common fish found on restaurant menus throughout the U.S., but at one time its appearance sparked controversy when it was known by its other name of dolphinfish. People conflated the dolphinfish with the marine mammal and recoiled in horror at the prospect of Flipper being served for dinner.

Never mind that the dolphinfish is actually unrelated to the dolphin, but perception is reality. To avoid any confusion, the Hawaiian name of mahi mahi was eventually adopted to refer to the dolphinfish, which inhabits tropical and subtropical waters worldwide.

Like other species consumed across the globe, mahi mahi are subject to the industrial fishing industry. Overfishing, or catching too many fish at once and impeding a population’s natural ability to breed and recover, remains a dire concern for conserving aquatic life in our planet’s oceans. The Environmental Defense Fund cites that “nearly a third of the world’s assessed fisheries” are threatened by overfishing. Certain fish are more susceptible than others to this harmful human activity, but mahi mahi has certain attributes that make it a more sustainable seafood option.

Read the full story at Mashed

The information age is starting to transform fishing worldwide

May 19, 2022 — People in the world’s developed nations live in a post-industrial era, working mainly in service or knowledge industries. Manufacturers increasingly rely on sensors, robots, artificial intelligence and machine learning to replace human labor or make it more efficient. Farmers can monitor crop health via satellite and apply pesticides and fertilizers with drones.

Commercial fishing, one of the oldest industries in the world, is a stark exception. Industrial fishing, with factory ships and deep-sea trawlers that land thousands of tons of fish at a time, are still the dominant hunting mode in much of the world.

This approach has led to overfishing, stock depletions, habitat destruction, the senseless killing of unwanted by-catch and wastage of as much as 30 percent to 40 percent of landed fish. Industrial fishing has devastated artisanal pre-industrial fleets in Asia, Africa and the the Pacific.

Read the full story at Greenbiz.com

 

The Blue Revolution: how technology helps reduce overfishing

May 3, 2022 — As older fishing fleets retire, new technologies help to create a more sustainable solution for an industry historically averse to change. The Blue Revolution, the new book from Nicholas P. Sullivan, tells that story.

Published last April, The Blue Revolution – Hunting, Harvesting, and Farming Seafood in the Information Age, dedicates 272 pages to tell the story of a long and worrisome problem for the world’s oceans, with few answers: overfishing.

In his new book the author reveals how while other industries have embraced technology, using anything from artificial intelligence to drones to become more efficient, “commercial fishing, one of the oldest industries in the world, is a stark exception. Industrial fishing, with factory ships and deep-sea trawlers that land thousands of tons of fish at a time, are still the dominant hunting mode in much of the world.”

There is hope, though, according to the author. Nicholas P. Sullivan writes that “many of the global fish stocks are at a dangerous tipping point, some spiraling toward extinction. But as older fishing fleets retire and new technologies develop, a better, more sustainable way to farm this popular protein has emerged to profoundly shift the balance.”

The Blue Revolution tells the story of the recent transformation of commercial fishing: an encouraging change from maximizing volume through unrestrained wild hunting to maximizing value through controlled harvesting and farming. Entrepreneurs applying newer, smarter technologies are modernizing fisheries in unprecedented ways. In many parts of the world, the seafood on our plates is increasingly the product of smart decisions about ecosystems, waste, efficiency, transparency, and quality.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

The information age is starting to transform fishing worldwide

April 14, 2022 — People in the world’s developed nations live in a post-industrial era, working mainly in service or knowledge industries. Manufacturers increasingly rely on sensors, robots, artificial intelligence and machine learning to replace human labor or make it more efficient. Farmers can monitor crop health via satellite and apply pesticides and fertilizers with drones.

Commercial fishing, one of the oldest industries in the world, is a stark exception. Industrial fishing, with factory ships and deep-sea trawlers that land thousands of tons of fish at a time, are still the dominant hunting mode in much of the world.

Fishing with data

Changes in behavior, technology and policy are occurring throughout the fishing industry. Here are some examples:

  • Global Fishing Watch, an international nonprofit, monitors and creates open-access visualizations of global fishing activity on the internet with a 72-hour delay. This transparency breakthrough has led to the arrest and conviction of owners and captains of boats fishing illegally.
  • The Global Dialogue on Seafood Traceability, an international business-to-business initiative, creates voluntary industry standards for seafood traceability. These standards are designed to help harmonize various systems that track seafood through the supply chain, so they all collect the same key information and rely on the same data sources. This information lets buyers know where their seafood comes from and whether it was produced sustainably.
  • Fishing boats in New Bedford, Massachusetts – the top U.S. fishing port, based on total catch value – are rigged with sensors to develop a Marine Data Bank that will give fishermen data on ocean temperature, salinity and oxygen levels. Linking this data to actual stock behavior and catch levels is expected to help fishermen target certain species and avoid unintentional bycatch.

The ocean’s restorative power

There is no shortage of gloomy information about how overfishing, along with other stresses like climate change, is affecting the world’s oceans. Nonetheless, I believe it bears emphasizing that over 78% of current marine fish landings come from biologically sustainable stocks, according to the United Nations. And overharvested fisheries often can rebound with smart management.

For example, the U.S. east coast scallop fishery, which was essentially defunct in the mid-1990s, is now a sustainable US$570 million a year industry.

Read the full story at The Conversation