Saving Seafood

Would you quit your job for $110,000? This California swordfish catcher said no

October 18, 2021 — As the morning fog peeled off the docks of Santa Barbara Harbor recently, fisherman Gary Burke eyed all that’s left of a fleet that once helped satisfy America’s insatiable appetite for swordfish: four old vessels with splotches of rust showing through peeling paint.

Decades ago, there were more than 100 such ships in Santa Barbara alone, towing mile-long drift gill nets in choppy seas far beyond the breakwater. Today, there are perhaps a dozen in the entire United States, and they will probably soon be removed from service.

Hammered by government regulations, foreign competition, soaring fuel and labor costs, fluctuating market prices, a state buy-back program to take nets out of the water, and conflicts with preservationists over incidental entanglements of whales, porpoises, seals, turtles and birds, Burke’s livelihood has gone the way of Southern California fur trappers and dairy farms.

As if all that weren’t enough, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency have issued an advisory warning that swordfish are not safe to eat because they contain high levels of mercury.

Read the full story at the Los Angeles Times

California sound system tries to keep whales and ships apart

August 19, 2019 — Scientists have installed an underwater sound system they hope will reduce collisions between whales and ships in the Santa Barbara Channel off Southern California.

A listening station on the channel floor is able to capture whale calls as far away as 30 miles (48 kilometers), the Los Angeles Times reported Friday. That device is connected by cable to a buoy floating above that transmits data by satellite to scientists on shore.

From there, captains can be alerted to slow their ships down or reroute.

It’s the latest attempt to prevent ships from running into whales in the channel, where cargo vessels in and out of the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach cross feeding grounds of endangered blue, fin and humpback whales.

Read the full story at the Associated Press

Proposed law could mean more drilling off California coast

November 27, 2017 — ORANGE COUNTY, California — Many of the 27 oil platforms drilling into the underwater shelf off the coast from Santa Barbara to Huntington Beach are decades old and, in the eyes of the oil industry and others, ready to be shut down.

Some cost big money to operate at a time of sagging oil prices. Others need expensive technical upgrades. And all are political targets, widely viewed in a liberal state as bigger environmental risks than the potential reward of pulling yet more carbon-generating oil from the Earth.

But the rigs also represent potential profit. By some estimates at least one billion barrels of oil remain untapped in the shelf off of Southern California, much of it accessible from federal waters, not the state-controlled areas within three miles of the coastline.

And that risk vs. profit conflict — plus Trump-era politics — is why lawmakers representing California are clashing with federal regulators over proposed legislation known as the Strengthening the Economy with Critical Untapped Resources to Expand American Energy Act.

Proponents say the SECURE American Energy Act will create high-wage jobs by making it easier for oil companies to work on federal land and in federal waters, all with less federal oversight.

Read the full story at The Orange County Register

Here’s How the Number of Fish in the Ocean Could More Than Double by 2050

March 31, 2016 — Fish populations around the world have been decimated by overfishing — but new research suggests that this could soon change if the world got its act together.

Fishermen around the world could haul around 16 million more metric tons of fish than they do today and generate $53 billion more in profits while more than doubling the amount of fish left in the oceans by 2050 if they adopted sustainable fishing practices, according to a report published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Those practices would involve a so-called “catch share” model of fisheries management. In catch share systems, regulators figure out the maximum number of fish that can be hauled from the sea without hurting future fish populations. The regulators then divvy up that amount of fish into shares that are distributed to individual fishermen. Each fisherman has a set amount of fish they are can catch in the year.

“If you can reform fisheries and eliminate their competitive nature, there’s enormous room for profits, catch, and abundance,” said Ray Hilborn, a professor of marine biology and fisheries science at the University of Washington who co-authored the study with researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara and the Environmental Defense Fund.

Read the full story at VICE News