Dirty Fishing

This week, the International Union for Conservation of Nature began its 10-day World Conservation Congress in Barcelona. Thousands of people representing academia, NGO's, businesses and governments are attending the event in order to debate, learn and voice their opinions on the environment.

As a part of the event, Oceana's Ranger catamaran is participating in Sailing to Barcelona, which is a gathering of marine conservation vessels in the Spanish port city. Xavier Pastor, the Executive Director of Oceana Europe, joined the Director of Fundacion Biodiversidad at a press conference today where they shared the most important aspects of the Ranger's expeditions and displayed many beautiful underwater images taken by Ranger's crew.

A new study in this week’s Science finds that the two distinct Atlantic bluefin tuna populations – those spawned in the Gulf of Mexico and those spawned in the Mediterranean Sea – meet during their juvenile years in the Atlantic before returning to their respective natal homes to reproduce.

In addition to being fascinating (the authors studied isotopes found in juvenile tuna ear bones used for balance, called otoliths, as they contain chemical markers delineating water composition), the study underscored a very important point about bluefin tuna conservation.

While there are two distinct spawning grounds, the tuna intermingle – meaning that U.S. fisheries may actually be catching eastern, Mediterranean tuna, and vice versa.

Why does this matter?

The most thorough assessment of land and marine mammals in 12 years, just published in Science, says that a quarter of the world's wild mammal species are at risk of extinction.

It took nearly 2,000 experts in more than 100 countries five years to complete the research. In other words: this one's big, and ought to be paid some serious attention.

While land mammals are most threatened by habitat loss and hunting, marine mammals are more in danger from bycatch, ship strikes and pollution.

I wanted to share an interesting NY Times piece about Somali pirates who hijacked a Ukrainian freighter and are asking for a multi-million dollar ransom to release the ship and its crew. It's odd to think that piracy still exists in this day and age, but people are driven to commit crime for all sorts of reasons: greed, lust, insanity, necessity and so forth.

The twist here? The pirates claim that they were driven to piracy because of illegal tuna fishing. Since Somalia has essentially been without a government since the early '90s, there was no one patrolling the shore. Enter the pirates. Somali diplomat Mohamed Osman Aden is quoted as saying, "It’s true that the pirates started to defend the fishing business...and illegal fishing is a real problem for us."

By no means are the pirates justified because of Somalia's struggle with illegal fishing off its coast, but this article demonstrates how precious the sea's protein is -- in the absence of a legitimate coast patrol, criminals took it upon themselves to protect the plundered resource.

Did you know that all six species of sea turtles in U.S. waters are listed under the Endangered Species Act?

Then I bet you'd be surprised to find out that our country's trawl fisheries still catch hundreds of sea turtles in their nets every year, killing or severely injuring many of them. Loggerhead turtles have been protected for 30 years, but their numbers continue to decline.

Fortunately, there's a way to prevent this: It's called a Turtle Excluder Device - or TED - and it's an "escape hatch" that allows a sea turtle to wiggle out of the trawl net, relatively unharmed.

While some fisheries use TEDs, too many do not - why? Because they're not required to.

My latest column for Away.com features seafood choices along the U.S. east coast. While flash-freezing and overnight shipping has made it possible to enjoy seafood nearly anywhere, there's something to enjoying local specialties.

Next time you're headed to the shore, whether it's Maine's lighthouses or Florida's beaches, keep these sustainable seafood tips in mind.

It seems that Ted Danson is everywhere this week to speak out on ocean issues. The U.K. Daily Telegraph features an interview with Ted where he speaks out against overfishing of the shark species that sometimes goes into fish and chips, that favorite meal of the Brits.

One quibble, however: The article states that Ted "attacks" the dish of fish and chips. That's not quite accurate - Ted attacks overfishing, for sure, but not any one meal in particular. As long as we can source our fish responsibly and sustainably, Ted's happy - and so are the rest of us at Oceana.

Earlier this month, the Norwegian coastguard captured dramatic footage of a ship called the Prolific discarding up to 80% of its catch of endangered fish in British waters by exploiting a loophole in EU law, which sets quotas for fish landed at ports, not what is actually caught at sea.

As the Guardian environment blogger observed, "The wasteful consequences of Europe's fisheries policies, though well-known, are rather abstract to most people - it all happens a long way out at sea. And that's the power of the video."

Couldn't have said it better myself -- this video is what our dirty fishing campaign is all about.

As promised on Monday, a post devoted to Taras Grescoe’s Bottomfeeder, which I just finished reading.

I’ve heard Grescoe called the “Michael Pollan for the oceans,” and I think that designation is pretty accurate. They are both compelling writers -- Pollan deals with the land and how it feeds us (and how we treat it in return), and Grescoe does the same for the oceans.

I'm a little late on this one, but last Friday the National Marine Fisheries Service announced that as of August 25, 2008, 180,000 square miles of the Bering Sea (that's five times the area of California) will be off-limits to bottom trawling.