pollution

Well, it's official. NOAA has declared a state of disaster for the Chesapeake Bay blue crab fishery due to poor environmental conditions leading to commercial failure.

The declaration means probable funding for the watermen hard hit by the economics of the situation, and hopefully, it means the crabs will get a chance to recover from overfishing, compounded by pollution and warming waters.

The crabs' numbers have fallen by more than 70 percent since the 1990s -- did you get that? -- 70 percent in less than two decades.

What would the Chesapeake Bay region be without its signature dish, crab cakes? If this disaster declaration doesn't spur real environmental action, we may some day find out.

While we at Oceana don't technically work on freshwater species, the news today that
four out of 10 freshwater fish species in North America are in peril is pretty astounding.

Plus, the researchers included fish such as salmon, that live in saltwater but which migrate to freshwater at times, along with the regular dwellers of lakes, streams and rivers.

The scientists found that 700 smaller but individual fish populations (subspecies) are vulnerable, threatened, or endangered. That's up from 364 nearly two decades ago.

On the list of the vulnerable are striped bass that live in the Gulf of Mexico, Bay of Fundy and southern Gulf of St. Lawrence, as well as several kinds of catfish. And Sockeye, Chinook, coho, chum and Atlantic salmon populations are also called threatened or endangered in the study.

More than 400 penguins from Antarctica and Patagonia, most of them young, have been found dead on the beaches of Rio de Janeiro over the past two months.

Everybody's talking about the detrimental effects of plastic, both on human health and the environment -- and this week's article in Time magazine is adding to the buzz.

I know I've been harping on the plastics/pollution issue a lot lately, but it seems like the din around the issue is growing louder. First, there's the Junk Raft, project of Algalita Marine Research Foundation. The blog's tagline is, "Sailing [from California] to Hawaii on 15,000 plastic bottles and a Cessna 310, to raise awareness about plastic fouling our oceans." Yesterday was the raft's one-month mark at sea, and they say they have an estimated eight more weeks to go.