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LOST at Sea

July 30, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
LOST at Sea

Besides its unfortunate acronym, LOST, how else can you explain the perpetually doomed status of the United Nations Convention Law of the Sea treaty? LOST, first adopted in 1982, would create a uniform set of laws for the sea—governing fishing, piracy, territory, and mining—and an international regulatory body, and has been ratified by 161 countries, leaving the U.S. in the company of 35 naysayers that include North Korea, Iran, and Burundi. It’s unlikely we’ll be joining the rest of the world this year—earlier this month two more Republican senators joined the group of ... Read More

More like this: Environment
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Breeding Tropical Fish to Save Their Schools

February 29, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

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

More like this: Environment, March-April 2012, News and Options
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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

More like this: Environment
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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

More like this: Environment
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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

More like this: European Dispatch, Legal Affairs
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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

More like this: European Dispatch, Health, January-February 2012
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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

More like this: Environment
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Snakeheads: the Asian Fish That Terrified Arkansas

July 5, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
Snakehead

Lee Holt, a biologist with the Arkansas Game & Fish Commission, aims his Chevy Silverado south, heading from his field office in Brinkley, Ark., out to the rice and soybean farms that surround this small Delta town. It's a hot, sticky summer day, and the A/C is thrumming inside the cab as Holt passes a Lutheran church on Highway 49 with a marquee that reads, "We Don't Serve A Wimpy God." This is the same road that he traversed a few months earlier, when he got a call from Russell Bonner's farm that changed his life and launched a sort of paranoia — and eventually an unprecedented ... Read More

More like this: Environment, July-August 2010, Magazine Feature Story
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Fishing for Answers in Alaska

December 15, 2009 • By • 4 Comments

Sand Point, Alaska It was drizzling rain as we pulled out of the harbor a little after 9 a.m. in the middle of last August. A light wind was blowing from the northeast, and the usual fog obscured our view of the mountains that line the Alaskan Peninsula. Vaguely, in the distance, loomed the big boy of the region, a snow-covered volcano known as Mount Pavlov. Flying over Pavlov at night, it's said, you can make out a faint glow pulsating ominously from down inside the cone. Our boat was the 37-foot gill netter Melissa Marie, captained by Benjamin Mobeck Jr., 41, and named for his daughter. ... Read More

More like this: Business & Economics, Environment, January-February 2010, Magazine Feature Story
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A Fishing War Off Somalia?

December 2, 2009 • By • Leave a Comment

When pirates attacked the Maersk Alabama for a second time this year on Nov. 18, a private security team fought them off. The reaction in the American press was instant. "Lesson from foiled pirate attack on the Maersk Alabama?" wrote the Christian Science Monitor. "Fire back." Some observers fell over themselves advising Spain to arm its fishing boats, because a Spanish tuna trawler, the Alakrana, had just been released a day earlier for a reported (and record-breaking) ransom of $3.3 million. The Spanish government had already changed its law in October to allow fishing vessels to carry ... Read More

More like this: European Dispatch, Politics
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