salmon

At last, sustainable sushi cards are on the way!

And now, a guest post:

Hi All, Leda Huta, Executive Director of Endangered Species Coalition here.

At the Endangered Species Coalition we protect the fish, plants and wildlife on the brink of extinction. Our No Species Left Behind campaign protects species from the bad acts of the Bush administration.

Corruption, abuse of science and a failure of ethics have plagued the Bush administration’s Departments of Interior and Commerce. Both departments are charged with protecting threatened and endangered marine wildlife. Yet politics have overruled science involving even the top levels of the Bush administration. For instance, the Office of Vice President Cheney has on several occasions tried to block protections for wildlife, such as the critically endangered right whale.

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.

Yesterday's New York Times featured an eloquently urgent op-ed about the demise of wild Pacific salmon. The author, Taras Grescoe, is swearing off salmon for two simple reasons: "it's too scarce and too expensive." While wild Atlantic salmon are already commercially extinct, the commercial Chinook season in California and most of Oregon has been canceled for the first time in 160 years.

Oceana has ambitious plans to protect one of nature's most biologically rich places, Chilean Patagonia.

This week in ocean news,

...fishery managers voted to cancel the chinook salmon fishing season off the coast of California and most of Oregon in light of the fish population's rapid collapse. The commercial fishery is worth an estimated $30 million....

...many fishermen considered supporting the ban on West Coast salmon fishing in light of this year's record low catch. "There's likely no fish, so what are you going to be fishing for?" said one....

...while some other fishermen went ahead with a pre-season barbeque, although it was less well attended than in past years...