Inside her humid Texas lab, Joan Holt weaves through 36 tall, cylindrical PVC tanks containing the nearly invisible larvae of one of the tropical fish species she studies. In each tank, the oxygen and salinity levels are slightly different. These tanks, with their unique filtering systems, are nothing like the home tanks familiar to ornamental-fish enthusiasts, but the research and innovations they represent just may change the $1 billion aquarium industry. Holt, a 70-year-old aquaculture specialist, is renowned for her groundbreaking research at the University of Texas Marine Science ... Read More
Can Farmed Fish Flourish on a Veggie Diet?
February 16, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Seafood reached a tipping point in 2009 when, for the first time, more than 50 percent of fish used for human consumption came from farms. That might sound like good news for oceans, but farmed fish largely subsist on a steady diet of smaller fish, which are caught from fragile fisheries. It’s not a sustainable equation. Aaron Watson, a researcher at University of Maryland’s Center for Environmental Science, says there is clear evidence that we are “fishing down the food chain, catching smaller and smaller fish to bring to the table and to bring to market, depleting wild ... Read More
Quake Rescues Reserve, Shakes Baja Fishing Town
February 1, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
The villages of the Colorado River delta in Mexico normally would be bubbling with excitement now about the coming high tides that produce a bounty of fish each spring. This is when a sea-going species, the gulf corvina, gathers in the upper Gulf of California off the mouth of the Colorado River, then rushes like clockwork during the high tides of March and April to spawn in the safer fresh water up the channel. At a place called El Zanjon, an indigenous tribe, the Cucapá, and poor delta residents have long netted the corvina spawn. On isolated salt flats along the river channel, ... Read More
Lowering Flags of Convenience for Fish Poachers
January 18, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
"Fish poaching" and "illegal fishing" may sound like misdemeanors, on the cosmic scale of crime, but they provide an astonishing mass of the fish people eat around the world. And they amount to a uniquely self-destructive problem that might one day solve itself by collapsing fish populations. “China is the largest fisher in the world, and the illegal fishers would come second,” an EU fisheries commissioner, Joe Borg, memorably told the BBC in 2009. “We are speaking of a very, very big problem.” This winter, a new proposal went before the U.S. Senate to help fight illegal fishing. ... Read More
Something’s Fishy About That Red Snapper
January 11, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
High-seas fish poaching is more than just a matter of sneaking marine life out of a restricted corner of the ocean; it’s an organized industrial crime that can strip coastal fishing grounds bare and deny even subsistence livelihoods to local fishermen. Foreign ships poaching in African waters, for example, have been a problem for years in Africa, east and west, and the crime fuels piracy, as well as illegal immigration. “The high seas today are like the American Wild West of the 19th century,” said the Pew Environment Group in 2011, “only the bandits are huge factory fishing ... Read More
Ocean Health Index: The Audacity of Necessity
December 13, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
“It’s an act of real audacity when a ranking system tries to be comprehensive and heterogeneous.” Noted journalist Malcolm Gladwell made this observation recently about the U.S. News and World Report college rating system. But the same could be said of the Ocean Health Index, which will debut early next year. It represents an enormously ambitious effort to quantify ocean health for every coastal country on the planet — reporting on everything from biodiversity to artisanal fishing to cultural uses to carbon storage and sequestration. We assert that when it comes to the ocean such ... Read More
Ocean Health Index Accounts for Human Benefits
November 8, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
With November elections upon us, we’re deluged with political speeches promising us happier and healthier lives, better jobs, a cleaner environment, and so on. It’s easy to get caught up in the political rhetoric, but it is also critical to step back and consider the source. In a speech given on the 25th anniversary of Earth Day, its founder drew a direct link between economic and ecological vitality. “The wealth of a nation is in its air, water, soil, forests, minerals, rivers, lakes, oceans, scenic beauty, wildlife habitats and biodiversity … that’s all there is,” said Sen. ... Read More
Dam Busting: A Concrete Victory for Fish, Jobs
October 14, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Perhaps you’ve seen the American Express TV ad where the famously contentious outdoorsman and clothesmaker Yvon Chouinard looks into the camera and declares, “I’m a dam buster.” He’s not alone in sharing that sentiment, as a sediment-choked dam in Southern California has become the bête noir of conservationists living there. A menacing wedge of concrete jammed between the steep walls of a canyon in the Los Padres National Forest, the Matilija Dam looms over the Ventura River. Built in 1947 both to store precious rainwater and preventing flooding when it did, the dam no longer ... Read More
Three Reasons for Creating a Single Ocean Health Index
October 11, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Just over 75 years ago, there was no easy way to track how well a nation’s economy and its people were doing. Data from all kinds of measures existed, but it was hard to interpret what they all meant. Responding in part to the dramatic declines of the Great Depression, the U.S. Congress in 1934 asked renowned economist Simon Kuznets to develop a method for gauging the condition, or health, of the United States. He came up with what we now know as the gross domestic product, or GDP. Although criticisms abound about its utility or appropriateness as a measure of national well-being ... Read More
The Making of the Ocean Health Index
July 12, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
If all goes well, when a scientific paper is published and the media pick up on the story, a lot of effort gets boiled down into a soundbite. New cure for cancer discovered. Water found on Mars. Fish stocks disappearing from the world's oceans. This focus can be a good thing for communicating science to the public, but it masks a lot of what was necessary to produce that result. Often, the story of how, and why, science gets done is as interesting and important as the actual result. Indeed, the decisions about what does not belong in the soundbite are as critical as the decisions about what ... Read More
