At OBI Seafoods, a sprawling operation with outposts throughout Alaska, there’s all sorts of extra machinery for workers to master. At Whole Foods Market, there are new guidelines for purchasing salmon from wholesalers. And at Ivar’s, a fixture on Seattle’s waterfront for eight decades, the chef is sending back more and more salmon delivered to his kitchen.
Behind all these changes is an alarming trend that’s been building for years: The giant schools of wild Pacific salmon that can turn southeast Alaska’s ice-cold waters into a brilliant orange blur are thinning out, and those that do survive are shrinking in size.
It’s the shrinking part that’s causing the biggest logistical snarl right now. Many salmon are so small they’ve thrown off OBI’s fish-sorting process and no longer meet the purchasing specifications at Whole Foods and culinary demands at Ivar’s. There, head chef Craig Breeden snaps photos of the fish next to his knife to illustrate their diminutive size before shipping them back.
“It’s very irritating when the supplier sends it to me and I see the size of these fillets,” he said. “In the last eight to 10 years, the salmon sizes have started to get smaller and smaller.”
These disruptions are, for now, more a nuisance than serious problem. But they almost certainly presage more costly changes to come and, much more importantly, raise alarm bells about the growing crisis in some key salmon populations that is being driven, according to many scientists, by climate change and more competition for food. Decades after the Atlantic cod fisheries collapsed, concern is now mounting among experts that wild Pacific salmon could face a similar fate.
“The whole thing is out of whack,” said Laurie Weitkamp, a U.S. fisheries biologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “Salmon managers are realizing that climate change is impacting their stocks and it is generally not favorable and it’s only going to get worse.”
Salmon are so vital that scientists call them a “keystone” species, since animals such as bears and eagles depend on them, and the fish indirectly spread nutrients into ecosystems including forests. A salmon’s life journey from freshwater streams to the ocean and back again to reproduce and die makes them especially vulnerable to warming temperatures and a shifting environment.
A bear and her cubs eat a sockeye salmon in Alaska’s Katmai National Park.Photographer: Luis Sinco/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images
Alaskan salmon are getting smaller partly because they’re returning from the ocean at a younger age, though scientists don’t really know why. The trend is also playing out across the Pacific Rim, from the U.S. mainland and Canada to Russia and Japan.
“When the size and the numbers go down that’s a harbinger of change that is taken as a red flag among many scientists,” said Peter Westley of the University of Alaska Fairbanks, co-author of a study on salmon size published last year with the University of California Santa Cruz.
The scientists examined four of the five Pacific salmon species in Alaska. Chinook — pursued by anglers and valued by restaurants — had the biggest average decline, at 8%, compared with pre-1990 fish. All other species shrunk, with sockeye showing the smallest decline at 2.1%. The most rapid changes were in the past decade.
Dwindling sizes in other species signaled a fishery’s collapse, including Canada’s Atlantic cod three decades ago.
In Europe and New England, the memory of rivers teeming with wild Atlantic salmon is all but forgotten due to overfishing, habitat loss and dam construction that blocked spawning grounds, said David Montgomery, whose 2003 book “King of Fish: The Thousand Year Run of Salmon” warns that the Pacific species could face the same fate. “Sadly, the book is still current.”
Agriculture, mining and other man-made interactions have sent Pacific salmon numbers plummeting in places including the Pacific Northwest’s Columbia-Snake River Basin. In some parts of Canada and the U.S., they’re endangered. Key runs in Alaska and Canada’s British Columbia province are seeing some of the worst years.
B.C.’s Fraser River had record low sockeye run sizes in three of the last five years, with last season setting a new low, said the Pacific Salmon Commission, which oversees management of the fish in the U.S. and Canada.
Collapsing Fisheries
“We are seeing a march north on the declines and collapses of salmon fisheries,” said Guido Rahr, head of Portland, Oregon-based Wild Salmon Center. “Japan has almost no wild fish left. In parts of Russia, once massive salmon runs are collapsing due to overfishing.”
Russia and the U.S. make up 85% of the world’s remaining Pacific salmon.
Sockeye salmon school up in the Upper Talarik River in the Alaska Peninsula.Photographer: Bob Hallinen/Anchorage Daily News/Tribune News Service/Getty Images
Less weighty catches mean fewer dollars for the $2 billion industry. Last year’s haul garnered $295.2 million, down 56% from 2019, Alaska estimates show.
“Salmon is such a nuanced and interconnected species — one little tweak when they are young can make a big change,” said Arron Kallenberg, founder and chief executive officer of seafood retailer Wild Alaskan Co. “From an industry standpoint it certainty makes an impact.”
While salmon runs in some areas saw steep population declines, Bristol Bay — supplier of about half the world’s sockeye — has had booming harvests. Even so, signs of smaller fish abound, OBI Seafoods CEO Mark Palmer said.What on Earth?The Bloomberg Green newsletter is your guide to the latest in climate news, zero-emission tech and green finance.EmailSign UpBy submitting my information, I agree to the Privacy Policy and Terms of Service and to receive offers and promotions from Bloomberg.
Historically, 4-pound sockeye and larger — key for commercial fisheries — comprise as much as 70% of each season’s Bristol Bay catch, Palmer said. Today, those larger salmon are no more than half the catch.
“Your yields go down a little bit with smaller fish,” he said.
At southeast Alaska’s Klukwan village, 115 miles north of Juneau, fishing nets have told the tale of shrinking salmon for years.
“Something is out of whack in the ocean and we wish we knew a way to fix it,” said Jones Hotch Jr., a tribal council member of this community of 40 families along a river whose indigenous name means “winter container for salmon.”
They depend on annual salmon return, which is why Hotch Jr. is pushing for stronger environmental protections against mining and other threats to the Chilkat River.
“My drive for saving our river for salmon runs to the very marrow of my being,” the 70-year-old said. “I believe that when we save our salmon, we save and preserve our culture.”
The corporate industrialized fishing interests as expected are working overtime in their attempts to discredit Seaspiracy. They are cherry picking the science and trying to suggest that industrial fishing is both sustainable and necessary. It’s not.Commercial industrialized fishing is not sustainable. It exists because of billions of dollars of government subsidies to prop it up. Remove the subsidies and the entire industry, an industry based on short term profit for short term gain will collapse.This film Seaspiracy is not directed at artisanal or indigenous fishing. In fact artisanal and indigenous fishing communities are being diminished and destroyed by corporate fishing. There are some positives. Kudos to Alaska for banning fish farms and for the hatcheries that support the wild salmon runs but this is an exception to the norm.For the most part the sea is being strangled of life by the super trawlers, the bottom trawlers, the huge seiners, the long-liners, the gill netters and by aquaculture.The situation is serious. It involves slavery, it promotes high seas piracy, it scours the sea bottom, it pollutes the marine environment with millions of tons of discarded plastic fishing debris.Corporate fishing is a global scheme of short term investment for short term gain and the fact is that coral reefs are dying, plastic is choking the depths, fish populations are being dangerously depleted and phytoplankton populations have been diminished by 40% since 1950 and phytoplankton produces more oxygen and sequesters more CO2 than all the trees and plants on land.How can it be justified for an endangered fish (Antarctic toothfish) to be caught and transported across the globe to be sold as Chilean sea bass in restaurants in Denver, Paris or a hundred other different cities? How can it be justified to feed millions of fish every year to pigs, chickens, farm raised salmon, cats and fur farms? How can it be justified to wipe out the herring runs off British Columbia to feed salmon in cages or to destroy seals in Canada or dolphins in Japan as scapegoats for the excessive greed of the fishing industry. I was raised in an Eastern Canadian fishing village in the Fifties and I have witnessed this steady diminishment of life in the sea and the astonishing ability of humanity to adapt and accept this diminishment. I have spent more than a half a century at sea in all the world’s oceans and I have seen the death, the destruction, the pollution and the greed.I don’t care what propaganda the industry and its enablers spread or how many biostitutes they hire to justify their greed. The fact is that a super trawler is an abomination against nature, a 100-mile long gill net or longliner is a weapon of mass ecological destruction and government subsidies are the evidence that worldwide, many governments are willingly complicit in the extermination of marine life and the collapse of marine eco-systems.I have seen with my own eyes the heart-breaking devastation of the Great Barrier Reef. We pulled one gill net from one ship (Thunder) from the depth of 2 kilometers off the coast of Antarctica that was 72 kilometers long and weighed 70 tons. We seized a drift net in the North Pacific that was over 100 miles in length and I’ve seen and smelt the bodies of a quarter of a million salmon rotting on the beach in Chile. Sustainable fishing is a myth and slapping the word onto a can of tuna claiming that no dolphins died is a blatant lie. And what about the tuna? 90% of Bluefin tuna populations have been eradicated? We massacre 70 million sharks a year primarily for their fins for a soup that has zero nutrition and then we complain when an average of five people die from shark attacks per year, a number lower than that of 40 people on average that die each year from falling from a skateboard. The fishing industry is driven by the politics and the economics of extinction. The more scarce the fish, the greater the demand and thus the greater the profit and there is almost a universal lack of economic or political will to police the high seas and to crack down on the poachers, the quota exceeders, the by-catch wasters and the corporate cartels that finance and control them. Predictably the industry trots out images of traditional fishermen, usually artisanal fishing communities implying that it is these hard-working individuals that we are seeking to shut down when it is the industrialized fishing operations that have been devastating artisanal and indigenous fishing communities around the world. After a long lifetime of voyages and campaigns and tens of thousands of sea miles, I have realized a truth and a reality that the industry works hard to ignore, discredit and deny. That truth is that life in the Ocean is being diminished and the very fact that we have lost 40% of our oxygen producing phytoplankton bodes darkly ill for the future of humanity. This is the reality. When the Ocean dies, we die with it.Note: For those who will surely try to claim that I am exaggerating about phytoplankton diminishment, here is a source for reference: (1) Source: Scientific American. Phytoplankton Population Drops 40 percent Since 1950 by Lauren Morello 2010.
Global dolphin populations are on the decline and eating fish may be the reason why as the mammals are frequenty bycatch of the fishing industry.BY CHARLOTTE POINTING
Fewer dolphins are turning up in fishing bycatch. Initially, this might seem like a reason to celebrate. But what this actually indicates, according to a new study, is that the population has declined and there are fewer dolphins left in the oceans to be caught.
What Is Bycatch?
Bycatch is one of the leading causes of death for dolphins and other cetaceans around the world. It happens when the animals accidentally swim into nets intended for fish, usually tuna.
Between 1950 and 2018, the fishing industry unintentionally caught around 4.1 million dolphins, says Dr. Putu Liza Mustika, who worked on the study. The research team—led by Dr. Charles Anderson of the Maldivian Manta Marine organization—looked at bycatch rates in the Indian ocean to draw its conclusions.
They estimate that the dolphin population in the Indian Ocean stands at 13 percent of what it was in the 1980s. Mustika notes that the figures in the study are “ball-park figures,” and therefore have a lot of uncertainties. But what they do confirm is the magnitude of the problem.
“Millions of dolphins [were] accidentally caught between 1950 and 2018,” she told LIVEKINDLY. “Millions. Not just a few hundreds of dolphins.”
Experts predict Iran has the biggest bycatch rate. Indonesia, India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Oman, Yemen, UAE, and Tanzania follow.
“The study includes a number of dolphins (and whale species), including indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins, humpback, Risso’s, and common dolphins,” adds Dr. Sarah Dolman from Whale and Dolphin Conservation (WDC).
She told LIVEKINDLY, “the scale of bycatch is almost certainly impacting regional and local dolphin populations. The study states that although tuna catches are increasing, dolphin bycatch stagnated in the 1990s. [It] has since declined, and is therefore unsustainable and impacting populations.”
Dolphins often end up as bycatch.
The Problem With Gillnets
According to Mustika, gillnets—a wall of netting that hangs in the ocean—are particularly lethal for dolphins. They can vary in length, ranging from 100 meters to more than 30 kilometers.
“Gillnets used to be made of cotton or hemp,” Mustika says. “But in the late 50s, they changed it to stronger materials (monofilaments). And also smaller mesh size to catch more fish (to meet human demand).”
It’s not just dolphins that end up as bycatch. The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) says, “entanglement in fishing gear is the leading threat for whales and dolphins around the globe. [It’s] estimated to cause at least 300,000 deaths per year.”
“Bycatch has led to the almost certain demise of the world’s smallest porpoise, the vaquita in the Gulf of California,” it adds. “Several more species are likely to follow if governments and fishers aren’t able to effective means to halt this unwanted and unnecessary cause of morality for cetaceans worldwide.”
According to Dolman, fishers caught 75 percent of odontocete species (toothed cetaceans) in gillnets in the past 20-plus years. Sixty-four percent of mysticetes species (baleen whales) have ended up as bycatch in the same time period, as well as 66 percent of pinnipeds (that’s animals like seals, sea lions, and walruses).
Sharks can also be victims of the fishing industry. Angie Coulter—a researcher with the Sea Around Us initiative at the University of British Columbia—spoke to National Public Radio (NPR) about the dangers of sharks getting caught up in bycatch.
“Sharks are apex predators,” she explained. “They hold all of these food chains together. If we’re removing these sharks [from the ecosystem], they really can’t catch up and will decline more and more.”
Fishers accidentally catch around 80,000 dolphins every year.
How Do We Save Dolphins From Bycatch?
Per 1,000 tonnes of tuna, the study estimates that 175 dolphins accidentally get caught in nets. At current levels, this means fishers accidentally catch about 80,000 dolphins every year.
“Bycatch is one of the main threats, if not the main threat to world-wide dolphin populations,” says Mustika. “If we can make fishing more sustainable, then we help dolphin populations.” She recommends that fishers use different gear, like a traditional pole and line.
Dolman notes that authorities have taken some action to mitigate the situation, including fishing bans and gear modifications, but more needs to be done.
“The countries who are fishing in the region and the Indian Ocean Tuna Commission is the Regional Fisheries Management Organisation that has responsibility for this issue, need to act,” she says. “There is much that can be done to better monitor, mitigate report, and enforce dolphin bycatch.”
She adds that the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) is currently producing best practice guidelines to prevent and reduce marine mammal bycatch. She notes: “this would be a good place to start.”
What About Tuna?
Dolphins, whales, and other cetaceans need urgent protection. But tuna themselves are at risk too. In 2018, fishers pulled nearly six million metric tonnes of tuna from the ocean.
Just like dolphins, some species of tuna are in decline. The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) says bluefin tuna is critically endangered.
“As the methods of catching tuna have advanced over the years, the conservation and management of tuna has not evolved as quickly,” says the WWF.
According to the FAO, most tuna stocks are “fully exploited” with “no room for fishery expansion.”
Shana Miller—the director of the Global Tuna Conservation Project—told NPR, “everywhere tuna swim, they’re being pursued by industrial fisheries.”
Consider opting for vegan tuna, like Tuno.
Vegan Fish
One way to save the dolphins and the tuna? Avoid fish altogether and choose vegan fish instead. Brands like Atlantic Natural Foods’ Tuno and Good Catch offer plant-based alternatives to tuna.
“Overfishing is a global problem that is getting worse by the day,” Tuno founder Doug Hines told Forbes. “The number of illegal vessels and underreporting is rampant on the high seas. And governments tend to turn the other way.”
Good Catch’s tuna features a six legume blend, but it still has that fishy taste, thanks to the addition of seaweed and algae extract.
CEO of the brand Chris Kerr told LIVEKINDLY, “our mission is to create delicious plant-based seafood options, giving people everything they like about seafood, but without the concerns about mercury and other pollutants, ocean harm or overfishing.“
A vast fishing armada off Ecuador’s biodiverse Pacific islands has stirred alarm over ‘indiscriminate’ fishing practicesSeascape: the state of our oceans is supported byAbout this content
Thu 6 Aug 2020 05.30 EDTLast modified on Thu 6 Aug 2020 11.18 EDT
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The Chinese reefer ship Fu Yuan Yu Leng 999 was intercepted in the Galápagos marine reserve in 2017 with about 300 tonnes of mostly sharks, including protected species. Photograph: Archivo Parque Nacional Galápagos
Jonathan Green had been tracking a whale shark named Hope across the eastern Pacific for 280 days when the satellite transmissions from a GPS tag on her dorsal fin abruptly stopped.
It was not unusual for the GPS signal to go silent, even for weeks at a time, said Green, a scientist who has been studying the world’s largest fish for three decades in the unique marine ecosystem around the Galápagos Islands.
But then he looked at satellite images in the area where Hope was last tracked – more than a thousand nautical miles west of the islands – and noticed the ocean was being patrolled by hundreds of Chinese fishing boats.
“I began to look into it and found that at the very end of her track she began to speed up,” said Green, co-founder and director of the Galápagos Whale Shark Project.
“It went from one knot to six or seven knots for the last 32 minutes – which is, of course, the speed of a fishing boat,” he said.
The fishing vessels that Green saw on the satellite images are believed to belong to an enormous Chinese-flagged fleet which Ecuadorian authorities last week warned was just outside the Galápagos Islands’ territorial waters.
“I don’t have proof but my hypothesis is that she was caught by vessels from the same fleet which is now situated to the south of the islands,” Green told the Guardian. She is the third GPS-tracked whale shark to have gone missing in the last decade, he added.
The Chinese fleet, numbering more than 200 vessels, is in international waters just outside a maritime border around the Galápagos Islands and also Ecuador’s coastal waters, said Norman Wray, the islands’ governor.
A female whale shark in the Galápagos archipelago. ‘The Galápagos Marine Reserve is a place of very great productivity, high biomass but also biodiversity.’ Photograph: Simon J Pierce
Chinese fishing vessels come every year to the seas around the Galápagos, which were declared a Unesco world heritage site in 1978, but this year’s fleet is one of the largest seen in recent years. Of the 248 vessels, 243 are flagged to China including to companies with suspected records of illegal, unreported and unregulated, or IUU, fishing, according to research by C4ADS, a data analysis NGO.
The fleet includes fishing boats and refrigerated container – or reefer – ships to store enormous catches.
Transferring cargo between vessels is prohibited under international maritime law yet the Chinese flotilla has supply and storage ships along with longline and squid fishing boats.
“There are some fleets which don’t seem to abide by any regulations,” said Wray.
One captain of an Ecuadorian tuna boat saw the Chinese fishing boats up close in early July, before the end of the tuna season.
“They just pull up everything!” said the captain, who asked not to be named. “We are obliged to take a biologist aboard who checks our haul; if we catch a shark we have to put it back, but who controls them?”
He recalled navigating through the fleet at night, constantly changing course to avoid boats, as their lights illuminated the sea to attract squid to the surface.
The longline fishing boats had up to 500 lines, each with thousands of fishhooks, he estimated, and claimed that some of the vessels would turn off their automatic tracking systems to avoid detection, particularly when operating in protected areas.
Chinese fishing practices first caught the attention of Ecuador in 2017 when its navy seized the Chinese reefer Fu Yuan Yu Leng 999 within the Galápagos marine reserve. Inside its containers were 6,000 frozen sharks – including the endangered hammerhead shark and whale shark.
“It was a slaughterhouse,” said Green, describing the images of the cargo hold. “This kind of slaughter is going on on a massive scale in international waters and nobody is witnessing it.”
The arrival of the latest fleet has also stirred public outrage and a formal complaint by Ecuador as its navy is on alert for any incursion into Ecuadorian waters.
The Chinese embassy in Quito said that China was a “responsible fishing nation” with a “zero-tolerance” attitude towards illegal fishing. It had confirmed with Ecuador’s navy that all the Chinese fishing vessels were operating legally “and don’t represent a threat to anyone”, it said in a statement last month. On Thursday China announced a three-month fishing ban in the high seas west of the marine reserve, but it will not come into force until September.
Roque Sevilla, a former mayor of Quito, who is leading a team in charge of designing a “protection strategy” for the islands, said the fleet practices “indiscriminate fishing – regardless of species or age – which is causing a serious deterioration of the quality of fauna that we will have in our seas”.
Ecuador would establish a corridor of marine reserves with Pacific-facing neighbours Costa Rica, Panama and Colombia to seal off important areas of marine diversity, Sevilla told the Guardian.
Protecting the Cocos Ridge, an underwater mountain range which connects the Galápagos Islands to mainland Costa Rica, and the Carnegie Ridge which links the archipelago to Ecuador and continental South America, could close off more than 200,000 sq nautical miles of ocean otherwise vulnerable to industrial fishing, he said.
He added Ecuador had called for a diplomatic meeting with Chile, Peru, Colombia and Panama to present a formal protest against China.Advertisementhttps://tpc.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-37/html/container.html
“When the Galápagos’s protected area was first created it was cutting edge,” said Matt Rand, director of the Pew Bertarelli Ocean Legacy, “but compared to other newer marine protected areas Galápagos is now potentially lacking in size to protect the biodiversity.”
Milton Castillo, the Galápagos Islands’ representative for Ecuador’s human rights ombudsman’s office, said he had asked the prosecutor’s office to inspect the cargo holds of the Chinese ships based on the legal principle of the universal and extraterritorial protection of endangered species.
The fleet often fishes in the territorial waters of low-income countries, the report said, having depleted fish stocks in domestic waters.
Green said the “explosion of life” created by the confluence of cold and warm ocean currents around the Galápagos Islands is exactly why the Chinese armada is hovering around the archipelago’s waters.
“The Galápagos marine reserve is a place of very great productivity, high biomass but also biodiversity,” he said. The longline fishing technique used by the fleet catch big fish like tuna, but also sharks, rays, turtles and marine mammals like sea lions and dolphins, he added.
“This is not fishing any more, it is simply destroying the resources of our oceans,” Green said. “We should ask whether any nation on this planet has the right to destroy what is common ground.”
A vast fishing armada off Ecuador’s biodiverse Pacific islands has stirred alarm over ‘indiscriminate’ fishing practicesSeascape: the state of our oceans is supported byAbout this content
Thu 6 Aug 2020 05.30 EDTLast modified on Thu 6 Aug 2020 11.18 EDT
Shares3,875
The Chinese reefer ship Fu Yuan Yu Leng 999 was intercepted in the Galápagos marine reserve in 2017 with about 300 tonnes of mostly sharks, including protected species. Photograph: Archivo Parque Nacional Galápagos
Jonathan Green had been tracking a whale shark named Hope across the eastern Pacific for 280 days when the satellite transmissions from a GPS tag on her dorsal fin abruptly stopped.
It was not unusual for the GPS signal to go silent, even for weeks at a time, said Green, a scientist who has been studying the world’s largest fish for three decades in the unique marine ecosystem around the Galápagos Islands.
But then he looked at satellite images in the area where Hope was last tracked – more than a thousand nautical miles west of the islands – and noticed the ocean was being patrolled by hundreds of Chinese fishing boats.
“I began to look into it and found that at the very end of her track she began to speed up,” said Green, co-founder and director of the Galápagos Whale Shark Project.
“It went from one knot to six or seven knots for the last 32 minutes – which is, of course, the speed of a fishing boat,” he said.
The fishing vessels that Green saw on the satellite images are believed to belong to an enormous Chinese-flagged fleet which Ecuadorian authorities last week warned was just outside the Galápagos Islands’ territorial waters.
“I don’t have proof but my hypothesis is that she was caught by vessels from the same fleet which is now situated to the south of the islands,” Green told the Guardian. She is the third GPS-tracked whale shark to have gone missing in the last decade, he added.
The Chinese fleet, numbering more than 200 vessels, is in international waters just outside a maritime border around the Galápagos Islands and also Ecuador’s coastal waters, said Norman Wray, the islands’ governor.
A female whale shark in the Galápagos archipelago. ‘The Galápagos Marine Reserve is a place of very great productivity, high biomass but also biodiversity.’ Photograph: Simon J Pierce
Chinese fishing vessels come every year to the seas around the Galápagos, which were declared a Unesco world heritage site in 1978, but this year’s fleet is one of the largest seen in recent years. Of the 248 vessels, 243 are flagged to China including to companies with suspected records of illegal, unreported and unregulated, or IUU, fishing, according to research by C4ADS, a data analysis NGO.
The fleet includes fishing boats and refrigerated container – or reefer – ships to store enormous catches.
Transferring cargo between vessels is prohibited under international maritime law yet the Chinese flotilla has supply and storage ships along with longline and squid fishing boats.
“There are some fleets which don’t seem to abide by any regulations,” said Wray.
One captain of an Ecuadorian tuna boat saw the Chinese fishing boats up close in early July, before the end of the tuna season.
“They just pull up everything!” said the captain, who asked not to be named. “We are obliged to take a biologist aboard who checks our haul; if we catch a shark we have to put it back, but who controls them?”
He recalled navigating through the fleet at night, constantly changing course to avoid boats, as their lights illuminated the sea to attract squid to the surface.
The longline fishing boats had up to 500 lines, each with thousands of fishhooks, he estimated, and claimed that some of the vessels would turn off their automatic tracking systems to avoid detection, particularly when operating in protected areas.
Chinese fishing practices first caught the attention of Ecuador in 2017 when its navy seized the Chinese reefer Fu Yuan Yu Leng 999 within the Galápagos marine reserve. Inside its containers were 6,000 frozen sharks – including the endangered hammerhead shark and whale shark.
“It was a slaughterhouse,” said Green, describing the images of the cargo hold. “This kind of slaughter is going on on a massive scale in international waters and nobody is witnessing it.”
The arrival of the latest fleet has also stirred public outrage and a formal complaint by Ecuador as its navy is on alert for any incursion into Ecuadorian waters.
The Chinese embassy in Quito said that China was a “responsible fishing nation” with a “zero-tolerance” attitude towards illegal fishing. It had confirmed with Ecuador’s navy that all the Chinese fishing vessels were operating legally “and don’t represent a threat to anyone”, it said in a statement last month. On Thursday China announced a three-month fishing ban in the high seas west of the marine reserve, but it will not come into force until September.
Roque Sevilla, a former mayor of Quito, who is leading a team in charge of designing a “protection strategy” for the islands, said the fleet practices “indiscriminate fishing – regardless of species or age – which is causing a serious deterioration of the quality of fauna that we will have in our seas”.
Ecuador would establish a corridor of marine reserves with Pacific-facing neighbours Costa Rica, Panama and Colombia to seal off important areas of marine diversity, Sevilla told the Guardian.
Protecting the Cocos Ridge, an underwater mountain range which connects the Galápagos Islands to mainland Costa Rica, and the Carnegie Ridge which links the archipelago to Ecuador and continental South America, could close off more than 200,000 sq nautical miles of ocean otherwise vulnerable to industrial fishing, he said.
He added Ecuador had called for a diplomatic meeting with Chile, Peru, Colombia and Panama to present a formal protest against China.Advertisementhttps://tpc.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-37/html/container.html
“When the Galápagos’s protected area was first created it was cutting edge,” said Matt Rand, director of the Pew Bertarelli Ocean Legacy, “but compared to other newer marine protected areas Galápagos is now potentially lacking in size to protect the biodiversity.”
Milton Castillo, the Galápagos Islands’ representative for Ecuador’s human rights ombudsman’s office, said he had asked the prosecutor’s office to inspect the cargo holds of the Chinese ships based on the legal principle of the universal and extraterritorial protection of endangered species.
The fleet often fishes in the territorial waters of low-income countries, the report said, having depleted fish stocks in domestic waters.
Green said the “explosion of life” created by the confluence of cold and warm ocean currents around the Galápagos Islands is exactly why the Chinese armada is hovering around the archipelago’s waters.
“The Galápagos marine reserve is a place of very great productivity, high biomass but also biodiversity,” he said. The longline fishing technique used by the fleet catch big fish like tuna, but also sharks, rays, turtles and marine mammals like sea lions and dolphins, he added.
“This is not fishing any more, it is simply destroying the resources of our oceans,” Green said. “We should ask whether any nation on this planet has the right to destroy what is common ground.”
Chinese fishing vessels have been involved in several confrontations in other countries’ waters. Photo: XinhuaChina has said its fishing fleet, the world’s biggest, has been banned from catching squid in parts of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans for three months to help populations recover. It comes as environmental groups and some nations say the country’s fleet is threatening to wipe out some fish populations.
The moratorium, effective from July, bans all Chinese fishing boats from operating in the designated areas, which are spawning grounds for squid – the main catch of the country’s vessels in international waters, according to the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs.
“The first fishing ban in international waters … shows that China is willingly and proactively collaborating with relevant coastal countries and international organisations in setting up recommendations and measures to protect the marine resources in international seas,” said Liu Yadan, the deputy secretary of the China Agricultural Association for International Exchange.
The ban comes as China faces a backlash over its fishing fleets, most recently for hundreds of vessels that converged around marine sanctuaries off Ecuador and the Galapagos Islands. Ecuador said it registered a complaint about the fleet and informed China’s authorities that Ecuador would defend its maritime rights.
China’s bans on fishing in waters off South America. Map: SCMP
On Sunday, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo issued a statement that noted the vessels near the Galapagos, and criticised Chinese fishing fleets for violating sovereign rights of coastal states and damaging ecosystems.
“Given this unfortunate record of illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing, rule-breaking and wilful environmental degradation, it is more important than ever that the international community stands together for the rule of law and insists on better environmental stewardship from Beijing,” Pompeo said in the statement.SCMP GLOBAL IMPACT NEWSLETTERUncover the most important stories from China that affect the worldSIGN UPBy registering, you agree to our T&C and Privacy Policy
China reels in as much as 70 per cent of the global squid catch. The country has over 600 squid vessels, which hauled in more than 520,000 tonnes in 2018, according to statistics from China’s Academy of Ocean.
01:41
Argentine coast guard opens fire on Chinese fishing boat
Argentine coast guard opens fire on Chinese fishing boatAreas covered by the moratorium are the two most important international squid fishing grounds for China’s fleet. The one in the South Atlantic near Argentina has almost 200 Chinese vessels operating there, while the banned zone in the Pacific is near Ecuador, according to a report by China Newsweek magazine.
The agricultural ministry said all Chinese vessels had now left the South Atlantic area where the ban has been imposed. The majority shifted to the Pacific or other international waters, according to the report.
Body of Indonesian fisherman dumped overboard amid allegations of abuse on Chinese shipChina has also been trying to rein in illegal fishing. In its 13th five-year plan covering 2016 to 2020, language about illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing was added to its new distant water fishing regulations for the first time.
The fisheries law that came into effect in March increased monitoring, control and surveillance, and stricter penalties for violations, including the creation of an IUU blacklist.
Tabitha Mallory, an affiliate professor with the University of Washington, said these could be seen as “positive first steps”.
“The Chinese government does not want to see its fishing fleet engage in activities that are harmful to other countries or to the environment. China cares about its reputation on this front, which is what is motivating the steps toward better management,” said Mallory, who researches China and global ocean governance.
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Historic fishing community in Ghana demolished for new harbour project funded by China
Historic fishing community in Ghana demolished for new harbour project funded by China
In addition to criticism from Ecuador, Chinese vessels have also been in clashes with Argentine authorities.
The Chinese trawler Lu Yan Yuan Yu 010 was sunk by Argentine coastguards in 2016, but disputes involving Chinese vessels have continued in the region. Earlier this year, the Argentine navy reported two Chinese vessels for illegal fishing in the country’s exclusive economic zone after pursuing the ships, according to digital magazine Dialogo.
Pan Wenjing, forest and oceans manager for Greenpeace East Asia, said incidents in Argentina’s waters could be one of the reasons that Beijing pushed for a voluntary ban on squid fishing.
“The southwest Atlantic is a major fishing ground for squid and thousand of boats operate in that area every year, including some of the large trawlers from China, which from time to time would cross maritime borders and cause conflicts in the region,” Pan said.
“That is also one of the reasons why China announced regulations on squid fishing in the high seas.”
Although the fishing ban is a good step, more is needed to promote marine conservation, said Wang Songlin, the founder of Qingdao Marine Conservation Society.
“The fishing ban is not a cure-all,” Wang said. “If after the ban, operation resumes and the amount fished is greater than the capacity of the ecosystem, then the conservation effects from the several months of the fishing moratorium would be cancelled out by the overfishing.”
Other measures were needed, he said, such as reducing the total number of fishing vessels, banning trawler nets that scoop up all surrounding marine life instead of just target species, and setting up marine protection zones.
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China imposes a 10-year fishing ban for Yangtze River to protect marine biodiversity
China imposes a 10-year fishing ban for Yangtze River to protect marine biodiversity
There are also humanitarian concerns relating to China’s fishing industry.
Conservation group Global Fishing Watch found that North Korean fishers have been displaced, as Chinese vessels operating in North Korean waters have hauled in massive amounts of squid, which was North Korea’s third largest export until it was blocked by US sanctions, imposed because of Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons programme.
A report by the group published in July, using analysis of tracking data and satellite imagery, estimated more than 900 China fishing vessels trawled for squid in the sea between North Korea and Russia in 2017, and over 700 in 2018.
These ships, which can include legally operated ships and illegal ones, were estimated to have hauled in 101,300 tonnes of squid worth US$275 million in 2017 and 62,800 tonnes of squid worth US$171 million in 2018. This was roughly equal to what Japan and South Korea combined would catch from all their surrounding seas, the report said.
Nothing like this had been seen before, according to Jaeyoon Park, senior data scientist at Global Fishing Watch. “It’s a really enormous group of vessels,” Park said.
“The presence of this foreign fleet also has severe consequences for North Korean small-scale fishermen, who can’t compete,” the report said. Those smaller vessels often went further out to sea and met tragedy, as seen in a phenomenon known as “ghost boats”.
Between 2014 and 2018, 505 North Korean “ghost boats” washed ashore on Japanese coasts, some of them containing human remains of fishers who had died from starvation as they were driven further afield to find fish, using boats not equipped for deepwater travel, according to the report.
“It’s not simply about conservation and protection of the environment,” Park said. “It represents a serious humanitarian problem.”Purchase the 120+ page China Internet Report 2020 Pro Edition, brought to you by SCMP Research, and enjoy a 30% discount (original price US$400). The report includes deep-dive analysis, trends, and case studies on the 10 most important internet sectors. Now in its 3rd year, this go-to source for understanding China tech also comes with exclusive access to 6+ webinars with C-level executives, including Charles Li, CEO of HKEX, James Peng, CEO/founder of Pony.ai, and senior executives from Alibaba, Huawei, Kuaishou, Pinduoduo, and more. Offer valid until 31 August 2020. To purchase, please click here.
Beijing — Scientists say a giant fish species that managed to survive at least 150 million years has been completely wiped out by human activity. Research published in the Science of The Total Environment this week says the giant Chinese paddlefish, also known as the Chinese swordfish, is officially extinct.
The monster fish, one of the largest freshwater species in the world with lengths up to 23 feet, was once common in China’s Yangtze River. Due to its speed it was commonly referred to in China as the “water tiger.”
A model of a giant Chinese paddlefish is seen on display in Chongqing, China.CCTV/REUTERS
Study leader Qiwei Wei of the Chinese Academy of Fishery Sciences called it “a reprehensible and an irreparable loss.”
Zeb Hogan, a fish expert at the University of Nevada, Reno, told National Geographic that it was “very sad” to see the “definitive loss of a very unique and extraordinary animal, with no hope of recovery.”
According to the researchers, no giant paddlefish have been sighted in the Yangtze since 2003, and there are none in captivity. They estimate that the last of the fish likely died between 2005 and 2010.
A graphic provided by the Science of The Total Environment report in January 2020 shows a timeline depicting the depletion of the giant Chinese paddlefish species in the Yangtze River.SCIENCE OF THE TOTAL ENVIRONMENT
The species had been deemed “functionally extinct,” or unable to reproduce enough to maintain itself, since 1993.
The main causes of the ancient species’ demise have been listed as over-fishing and the construction of a major dam in 1981 that split the Yangtze, and the Chinese paddlefish population along with it, in two.
The 3,900 mile Yangtze River ecosystem has seen half of the 175 species unique to its waters go extinct, according to Chinese media.
Two other species native to the river have also been declared functionally extinct: the reeves shad and the Yangtze dolphin.
Last week China announced a 10-year fishing ban on some areas of the Yangtze in a bid to protect its beleaguered biodiversity.
‘I’m hoping it’s not too little too late,’ says Mamalilikulla First Nation chief councillor
CBC News ·
The Mamalilikulla First Nation delivered salmon to grizzly bears in their traditional territories where they are known to feed. (File pictures/Canadian Press)
When Richard Sumner saw how emaciated the grizzly bears were in his neck of the woods, he knew something had to be done.
Sumner, chief councillor of the Mamalilikulla First Nation, says the creeks and streams on the nation’s territory, which encompass the islands off the northeast coast of Vancouver Island between Alert Bay and Knight Inlet, are no longer rich with salmon, and resident bears are starving and travelling outside traditional hunting grounds in a desperate effort to find food.
So the Mamalilikulla people fed them.
The nation’s Guardian Watchmen Manager, Jake Smith, had a local hatchery donate approximately 500 salmon carcasses and members of the nation took the fish to estuary areas where grizzlies are known to feed.
“I’m hoping it’s not too little too late,” said Sumner in a phone interview on CBC’s On The Island, adding there are many other areas of British Columbia where bears that depend on salmon are hungry.
He said grizzlies are starting to travel between all the small islands in the area and are even making their way over to Vancouver Island in search of fish, something that rarely happened in the past.
“The lack of salmon is not a natural thing,” said Sumner, who blamed human activity such as deforestation and over-fishing for reducing salmon stocks to perilous levels.
Sumner said while he understands humans should not interfere with wild animals, the Mamalilikulla people are the stewards of their territory and according to Sumner, the alternative was to watch the bears die.
“We just hope we can get enough bulk on them to last the winter,” said Sumner.
Some of the 400 members of the Mamalilikulla nation are suffering too.
“Nobody has any fish in their freezer or any canned fish for the winter,” he said. “It’s been a real disastrous year.”
Sumner does not know if more fish will be available for future deliveries.
Sumner said he is meeting Thursday with a bear biologist and provincial authorities to discuss the issue further.
To hear the complete interview with Richard Sumner, see the audio link below:
Fishing nets and ropes are a frequent hazard for olive ridley sea turtles, seen on a beach in India’s Kerala state in January. A new 1,500-page report by the United Nations is the most exhaustive look yet at the decline in biodiversity across the globe.CreditSoren Andersson/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
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Fishing nets and ropes are a frequent hazard for olive ridley sea turtles, seen on a beach in India’s Kerala state in January. A new 1,500-page report by the United Nations is the most exhaustive look yet at the decline in biodiversity across the globe.CreditCreditSoren Andersson/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
WASHINGTON — Humans are transforming Earth’s natural landscapes so dramatically that as many as one million plant and animal species are now at risk of extinction, posing a dire threat to ecosystems that people all over the world depend on for their survival, a sweeping new United Nations assessment has concluded.
The 1,500-page report, compiled by hundreds of international experts and based on thousands of scientific studies, is the most exhaustive look yet at the decline in biodiversity across the globe and the dangers that creates for human civilization. A summary of its findings, which was approved by representatives from the United States and 131 other countries, was released Monday in Paris. The full report is set to be published this year.
Its conclusions are stark. In most major land habitats, from the savannas of Africa to the rain forests of South America, the average abundance of native plant and animal life has fallen by 20 percent or more, mainly over the past century. With the human population passing 7 billion, activities like farming, logging, poaching, fishing and mining are altering the natural world at a rate “unprecedented in human history.”
At the same time, a new threat has emerged: Global warming has become a major driver of wildlife decline, the assessment found, by shifting or shrinking the local climates that many mammals, birds, insects, fish and plants evolved to survive in.
As a result, biodiversity loss is projected to accelerate through 2050, particularly in the tropics, unless countries drastically step up their conservation efforts.
Cattle grazing on a tract of illegally cleared Amazon forest in Pará State, Brazil. In most major land habitats, the average abundance of native plant and animal life has fallen by 20 percent or more, mainly over the past century.CreditLalo de Almeida for The New York Times
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Cattle grazing on a tract of illegally cleared Amazon forest in Pará State, Brazil. In most major land habitats, the average abundance of native plant and animal life has fallen by 20 percent or more, mainly over the past century.CreditLalo de Almeida for The New York Times
The report is not the first to paint a grim portrait of Earth’s ecosystems. But it goes further by detailing how closely human well-being is intertwined with the fate of other species.
“For a long time, people just thought of biodiversity as saving nature for its own sake,” said Robert Watson, chair of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services,which conducted the assessment at the request of national governments. “But this report makes clear the links between biodiversity and nature and things like food security and clean water in both rich and poor countries.“
A previous report by the group had estimated that, in the Americas, nature provides some $24 trillion of non-monetized benefits to humans each year. The Amazon rain forest absorbs immense quantities of carbon dioxide and helps slow the pace of global warming. Wetlands purify drinking water. Coral reefs sustain tourism and fisheries in the Caribbean. Exotic tropical plants form the basis of a variety of medicines.
But as these natural landscapes wither and become less biologically rich, the services they can provide to humans have been dwindling.
Humans are producing more food than ever, but land degradation is already harming agricultural productivity on 23 percent of the planet’s land area, the new report said. The decline of wild bees and other insects that help pollinate fruits and vegetables is putting up to $577 billion in annual crop production at risk. The loss of mangrove forests and coral reefs along coasts could expose up to 300 million people to increased risk of flooding.
The authors note that the devastation of nature has become so severe that piecemeal efforts to protect individual species or to set up wildlife refuges will no longer be sufficient. Instead, they call for “transformative changes” that include curbing wasteful consumption, slimming down agriculture’s environmental footprint and cracking down on illegal logging and fishing.
“It’s no longer enough to focus just on environmental policy,” said Sandra M. Díaz, a lead author of the study and an ecologist at the National University of Córdoba in Argentina. “We need to build biodiversity considerations into trade and infrastructure decisions, the way that health or human rights are built into every aspect of social and economic decision-making.”
Scientists have cataloged only a fraction of living creatures, some 1.3 million; the report estimates there may be as many as 8 million plant and animal species on the planet, most of them insects. Since 1500, at least 680 species have blinked out of existence, including the Pinta giant tortoise of the Galápagos Islands and the Guam flying fox.
Though outside experts cautioned it could be difficult to make precise forecasts, the report warns of a looming extinction crisis, with extinction rates currently tens to hundreds of times higher than they have been in the past 10 million years.
“Human actions threaten more species with global extinction now than ever before,” the report concludes, estimating that “around 1 million species already face extinction, many within decades, unless action is taken.”
Unless nations step up their efforts to protect what natural habitats are left, they could witness the disappearance of 40 percent of amphibian species, one-third of marine mammals and one-third of reef-forming corals. More than 500,000 land species, the report said, do not have enough natural habitat left to ensure their long-term survival.
Over the past 50 years, global biodiversity loss has primarily been driven by activities like the clearing of forests for farmland, the expansion of roads and cities, logging, hunting, overfishing, water pollution and the transport of invasive species around the globe.
In Indonesia, the replacement of rain forest with palm oil plantations has ravaged the habitat of critically endangered orangutans and Sumatran tigers. In Mozambique, ivory poachers helped kill off nearly 7,000 elephants between 2009 and 2011 alone. In Argentina and Chile, the introduction of the North American beaver in the 1940s has devastated native trees (though it has also helped other species thrive, including the Magellanic woodpecker).
All told, three-quarters of the world’s land area has been significantly altered by people, the report found, and 85 percent of the world’s wetlands have vanished since the 18th century.
And with humans continuing to burn fossil fuels for energy, global warming is expected to compound the damage. Roughly 5 percent of species worldwide are threatened with climate-related extinction if global average temperatures rise 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, the report concluded. (The world has already warmed 1 degree.)
“If climate change were the only problem we were facing, a lot of species could probably move and adapt,” Richard Pearson, an ecologist at the University College of London, said. “But when populations are already small and losing genetic diversity, when natural landscapes are already fragmented, when plants and animals can’t move to find newly suitable habitats, then we have a real threat on our hands.”
The dwindling number of species will not just make the world a less colorful or wondrous place, the report noted. It also poses risks to people.
Volunteers collected trash in March in a mangrove forest in Brazil. The loss of mangrove forests and coral reefs along coasts could expose up to 300 million people to increased risk of flooding.CreditAmanda Perobelli/Reuters
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Volunteers collected trash in March in a mangrove forest in Brazil. The loss of mangrove forests and coral reefs along coasts could expose up to 300 million people to increased risk of flooding.CreditAmanda Perobelli/Reuters
Today, humans are relying on significantly fewer varieties of plants and animals to produce food. Of the 6,190 domesticated mammal breeds used in agriculture, more than 559 have gone extinct and 1,000 more are threatened. That means the food system is becoming less resilient against pests and diseases. And it could become harder in the future to breed new, hardier crops and livestock to cope with the extreme heat and drought that climate change will bring.
“Most of nature’s contributions are not fully replaceable,” the report said. Biodiversity loss “can permanently reduce future options, such as wild species that might be domesticated as new crops and be used for genetic improvement.”
The report does contain glimmers of hope. When governments have acted forcefully to protect threatened species, such as the Arabian oryx or the Seychelles magpie robin, they have managed to fend off extinction in many cases. And nations have protected more than 15 percent of the world’s land and 7 percent of its oceans by setting up nature reserves and wilderness areas.
Still, only a fraction of the most important areas for biodiversity have been protected, and many nature reserves poorly enforce prohibitions against poaching, logging or illegal fishing. Climate change could also undermine existing wildlife refuges by shifting the geographic ranges of species that currently live within them.
So, in addition to advocating the expansion of protected areas, the authors outline a vast array of changes aimed at limiting the drivers of biodiversity loss.
Farmers and ranchers would have to adopt new techniques to grow more food on less land. Consumers in wealthy countries would have to waste less food and become more efficient in their use of natural resources. Governments around the world would have to strengthen and enforce environmental laws, cracking down on illegal logging and fishing and reducing the flow of heavy metals and untreated wastewater into the environment.
The authors also note that efforts to limit global warming will be critical, although they caution that the development of biofuels to reduce emissions could end up harming biodiversity by further destroying forests.
An elephant in the Lewa Wildlife Conservancy at the foot of Mount Kenya, outside Nairobi. More than 500,000 land species do not have enough natural habitat left to ensure their long-term survival.CreditTony Karumba/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
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An elephant in the Lewa Wildlife Conservancy at the foot of Mount Kenya, outside Nairobi. More than 500,000 land species do not have enough natural habitat left to ensure their long-term survival.CreditTony Karumba/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
None of this will be easy, especially since many developing countries face pressure to exploit their natural resources as they try to lift themselves out of poverty.
But, by detailing the benefits that nature can provide to people, and by trying to quantify what is lost when biodiversity plummets, the scientists behind the assessment are hoping to help governments strike a more careful balance between economic development and conservation.
“You can’t just tell leaders in Africa that there can’t be any development and that we should turn the whole continent into a national park,” said Emma Archer, who led the group’s earlier assessment of biodiversity in Africa. “But we can show that there are trade-offs, that if you don’t take into account the value that nature provides, then ultimately human well-being will be compromised.”
In the next two years, diplomats from around the world will gather for several meetings under the Convention on Biological Diversity, a global treaty, to discuss how they can step up their efforts at conservation. Yet even in the new report’s most optimistic scenario, through 2050 the world’s nations would only slow the decline of biodiversity — not stop it.
“At this point,” said Jake Rice, a fisheries scientist who led an earlier report on biodiversity in the Americas, “our options are all about damage control.”
The apocalypse has a new date: 2048.That’s when the world’s oceans will be empty of fish, predicts an international team of ecologists and economists. The cause: the disappearance of species due to overfishing, pollution, habitat loss, and climate change.
The study by Boris Worm, PhD, of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, — with colleagues in the U.K., U.S., Sweden, and Panama — was an effort to understand what this loss of ocean species might mean to the world.
The researchers analyzed several different kinds of data. Even to these ecology-minded scientists, the results were an unpleasant surprise.
“I was shocked and disturbed by how consistent these trends are — beyond anything we suspected,” Worm says in a news release.
“This isn’t predicted to happen. This is happening now,” study researcher Nicola Beaumont, PhD, of the Plymouth Marine Laboratory, U.K., says in a news release.
“If biodiversity continues to decline, the marine environment will not be able to sustain our way of life. Indeed, it may not be able to sustain our lives at all,” Beaumont adds.
Already, 29% of edible fish and seafood species have declined by 90% — a drop that means the collapse of these fisheries.
But the issue isn’t just having seafood on our plates. Ocean species filter toxins from the water. They protect shorelines. And they reduce the risks of algae blooms such as the red tide.
“A large and increasing proportion of our population lives close to the coast; thus the loss of services such as flood control and waste detoxification can have disastrous consequences,” Worm and colleagues say.
The researchers analyzed data from 32 experiments on different marine environments.
They then analyzed the 1,000-year history of 12 coastal regions around the world, including San Francisco and Chesapeake bays in the U.S., and the Adriatic, Baltic, and North seas in Europe.
Next, they analyzed fishery data from 64 large marine ecosystems.
And finally, they looked at the recovery of 48 protected ocean areas.
Their bottom line: Everything that lives in the ocean is important. The diversity of ocean life is the key to its survival. The areas of the ocean with the most different kinds of life are the healthiest.
But the loss of species isn’t gradual. It’s happening fast — and getting faster, the researchers say.
Worm and colleagues call for sustainable fisheries management, pollution control, habitat maintenance, and the creation of more ocean reserves.
This, they say, isn’t a cost; it’s an investment that will pay off in lower insurance costs, a sustainable fish industry, fewer natural disasters, human health, and more.
“It’s not too late. We can turn this around,” Worm says. “But less than 1% of the global ocean is effectively protected right now.”
Worm and colleagues report their findings in the Nov. 3 issue of Science.
SOURCES: Worm, B. Science, Nov. 3, 2006; vol 314: pp 787-790. News release, SeaWeb. News release, American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Only 2 baby penguins from a colony of 40,000 survived in Antarctica last year! And scientists say the whole ecosystem could collapse unless we protect it from massive fishing fleets and climate destruction. Countries are about to vote to create a HUGE sanctuary. European leaders want it, but to get them to drive it home we’ve got to show it is a massive public priority.Join now — let’s get a million voices, opinion polls and media ads before the vote.
Dear friends,
18,000 beautiful baby penguins hatched in an Antarctic colony last winter. But just two survived!
The rest starved — and industrial-scale fishing and climate change threaten to wipe out countless other polar species. Scientists say the only way to save Antarctica’s ocean is by urgently protecting it — and if just two more governments give their backing, we can create a massive network of ocean sanctuaries there.
The vote is coming up, and European leaders can bring the blockers on board — if we quickly show massive public support, we can make sure they step up.Let’s make this huge, then run opinion polls, take out media ads, and deliver our voices directly to President Macron and the EU, calling on them to save this penguin paradise, before it’s too late.
In 2016, millions of us helped rally public pressure to create the first Antarctic Ocean sanctuary, in the Ross Sea. It is the largest marine protected area on the planet. But it represents only a small portion of the fragile ocean that surrounds Antarctica.
The wildlife there is already struggling because of climate change — and industrial fishing fleets could push this fragile ecosystem over the edge. At least three more sanctuaries are needed to keep this precious wilderness safe. And they could be created if we make sure EU leaders feel this is a public priority.
Whether we win another marine sanctuary there comes down to a single decision. Russia and China are the two main blockers — but experts say that French President Macron and the EU Commission can win them over. Let’s inspire them to action by raising a million beautiful voices to save this polar paradise — join now and share this everywhere.
Avaaz means voice in many languages and speaking up for our fragile planet is one of the things we do best. We have helped secure massive marine reserves all around the world — but this time, it’s not just one more sanctuary — we’re going for the entire Antarctic network and this petition will keep building until it is fully established.
With hope and determination,
Lisa, Pascal, Bert, Christoph, Mike, Nataliya and the whole Avaaz team
Exposing the Big Game 