Saving Seafood

Loved to Death: How Pirate Fishing Decimates Chile’s Favorite Fish

October 26, 2018 — When Hugo Arancibia Farías was a child, his mother, like most mothers in central Chile, visited the weekly market to buy common hake, a white-fleshed relative of cod. She usually served it fried, Arancibia recalled with relish. “It was very cheap,” he said, “and very popular.”

Nowadays, hake is more expensive than beef. “It is too much for a family,” said Arancibia, a fisheries biologist at the University of Concepción in central Chile. The reason is simple economics: The scarcer a resource, the more expensive. After a devastating population crash in the mid-2000s, Chile’s once-common hake have yet to recover.

After years of blaming the collapse on an influx of predatory squid, Arancibia said, fisheries officials recently wised up to the real culprit: a vast tide of illegal fishing, much of it from artisanal fishers. If the illegal hake catch can’t be reined in, experts say, Chile stands to lose its most important artisanal fishery, a cultural touchstone—and a pretty tasty fried fish.

Common hake, called merluza in Spanish, is to Chile what cod was to New England. But unlike hulking cod, hake’s not much to look at, at least not anymore.

In the seafood market in Caleta Portales, a fish landing site in the central Chilean city of Valparaiso, hake are the little guys heaped among monstrous cusk eels and seabream as big and flat as dinner plates. The little hake have skinny, tapering bodies, big heads and bugged eyes—the result of gas expansion as the fish were yanked up quickly from ocean depths.

Hake weren’t always so runty. They used to be bigger at maturity, by several centimeters. But nowadays, because of overfishing, there aren’t many big fish left. Most hake in Chilean waters are juveniles, and the adults are getting smaller as they race to reproduce before they’re caught.

The first ripples of overfishing stirred in the 1990s, as Chile poured its national energies into economic growth after the end of a two-decade military dictatorship. Fisheries policies encouraged the rapid expansion of an industrial, export-oriented fleet, with little thought to sustainability. “The attitude was to produce, to exploit, to overexploit,” Arancibia said.

Read the full story at EcoWatch

Peru anchovy biomass at record high

September 20, 2018 — During the last century Peru’s anchovy biomass reached its highest level in 25,000 years, according to Francois Gerlotto, a researcher with France’s Institute for Development Research (IRD).

The message is that “we are at a high level of productivity and that we must adapt to climate variability”, said the French scientist during his presentation at the Marine Sustainability Conference, organized by Peru’s National Fisheries Society.

“While it is true that we must reduce fishing pressure when biomass is at low levels, we must not believe that this will solve everything, because there are other variables that must be taken into account to ensure the sustainability of the sea,” he said.

Gerlotto also said that “the solution is not to stop fishing to protect the ecosystem, but to produce food more efficiently”, echoing the words of recently re-elected International Coalition of Fishing Associations (ICFA) president Javier Garat.

Gerlotto, who is also a member of the Scientific Committee of the Regional Organization of Fisheries Management of the South Pacific (OROP-PS), reported that this institution has proposed the creation of a working group to monitor the habitat of fishing resources.

In that sense, he considered that the possible return of some species, such as horse mackerel and sardine, that are not present in Peruvian waters currently, will depend on the conditions of their habitat.

Read the full story at Undercurrent News

War on sharks: How rogue fishing fleets plunder the ocean’s top predator

August 8, 2018 –It was billed as the biggest poaching bust in history, a monumental win for conservationists.

An Ecuadorean Navy patrol vessel, guided by advanced radar and a small plane, bore down on a ship the length of a football field making a beeline across the Galapagos Marine Reserve—probably the most fiercely protected waters in the world. Filling the freighter’s freezers: 150 tons of dead , most of them endangered and illegal to sell.

Only small pieces off those 6,000 carcasses were actually of much value. The fins.

Shark fins are a delicacy in China, the feature ingredient in an expensive soup served at banquets and fancy restaurants. At peak, dried fins have sold for more per pound than heroin. That price, coupled with high demand from a booming Chinese economy, has created a brutally efficient industry capable of strip-mining sharks from the sea.

With fishing lines over 75 miles long, commercial shark fishermen catch hundreds of sharks in a single try. Tens of millions of sharks are fished from the world’s oceans every year, and some scientists have estimated that number to be over 100 million.

“The amount of sharks that we are pulling in all over the world, it seems insane that there should be any left at all,” said shark conservationist Ben Harris, director of Sea Shepherd Conservation Society’s Panama Chapter.

Shark poaching happens everywhere, from Florida to French Polynesia, but it’s the Pacific Ocean off Central America that has become ground zero in the battle to protect sharks. Even here—by many measures the richest shark waters on the planet—biologists fear relentless overfishing could spiral populations of the most sought-after species into irreversible collapse and take the entire marine food chain down with them.

The big question has become which will disappear first—sharks or the shark fin trade.

“It’s a very close race right now,” said Harris, who has spent decades in small speedboats chasing shark poachers out of Central American marine reserves.

This two-year investigation first published by “Reveal,” a radio show and podcast supported by the Center for Investigative Reporting, found that despite stricter protections enacted by many coastal countries, international trade in shark products remains strong in the Eastern Pacific. Reporting in port towns across five countries from Ecuador to El Salvador showed in some cases new laws intended to curb the slaughter of sharks appear to have had the opposite effect.

Read the full story from the Miami Herald at PHYS.org

Like a Slimy Taser, Electric Eels Can Leap Out and Zap Their Prey

June 7, 2016 — This summer’s science horror blockbuster is a remake: Return of the Leaping Electric Eel!

If you have any kind of phobia of slimy, snakelike creatures that can rise from the water and use their bodies like Tasers, this story — and the accompanying video — may not be for you.

The original tale (there was, alas, no video) dates to 1800 when the great explorer Alexander von Humboldt was in South America and enlisted local fishermen to catch some of these eels for the new (at the time) study of electricity.

He wrote that the men herded horses and mules into a shallow pond and let the eels attack by pressing themselves against the horses. The horses and mules tried to escape, but the fishermen kept them in the water until the eels used up their power. Two horses died, probably from falling and drowning.

Or so Humboldt said. Though the story was widely retold, no other report of this kind of fishing-with-horses phenomenon surfaced for more than 200 years, according to Kenneth Catania, a scientist with a passion for studying the eel species in question, electrophorus electricus.

Read the full story from The New York Times

Fish Stocks Are Declining Worldwide, And Climate Change Is On The Hook

December 14, 2015 — For anyone paying attention, it’s no secret there’s a lot of weird stuff going on in the oceans right now. We’ve got a monster El Nino looming in the Pacific. Ocean acidification is prompting hand wringing among oyster lovers. Migrating fish populations have caused tensions between countries over fishing rights. And fishermen say they’re seeing unusual patterns in fish stocks they haven’t seen before.

Researchers now have more grim news to add to the mix. An analysis published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences finds that the ability of fish populations to reproduce and replenish themselves is declining across the globe.

“This, as far as we know, is the first global-scale study that documents the actual productivity of fish stocks is in decline,” says lead author Gregory L. Britten, a doctoral student at the University of California, Irvine.

Britten and some fellow researchers looked at data from a global database of 262 commercial fish stocks in dozens of large marine ecosystems across the globe. They say they’ve identified a pattern of decline in juvenile fish (young fish that have not yet reached reproductive age) that is closely tied to a decline in the amount of phytoplankton, or microalgae, in the water.

Read the full story at NPR