There is a very nice summary article about overfishing and fisheries management at ActionBioScience written by Dr. J. Emmett Duffy, one of the world’s leading marine ecologists. Emmett is a pioneer of work on the importance  marine biodiversity and he discovered the first known example of eusociality in a marine critter; shrimp that live within sponges.  You may have seen Emmett’s footage of this in the David Attenborough movie “Blue Planet”.  You can read about Emmett’s research here and his awesome blog the Natural Patriot here.

Ill exerpt some of Emmet’s article on “The Future of Marine Fish Resources” below.  Read the full articles here.

Currently, fishing pressure appears to be near—if not beyond—the ocean’s capacity to provide. Estimates based on fisheries catch data, which were corrected for over-reporting by China, suggest that global fish catch peaked in the late 1980s, and this number has remained flat or begun to decline since.^1,9The Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (FAO) conducts the most comprehensive analysis of global fish stocks every four years, and recently reported that “the maximum wild capture fisheries potential from the world’s oceans has probably been reached.”¹ The situation is reminiscent of society’s reaching the point of peak oil—although fishery production is at least partially a renewable resource.

What about individual fish stocks? In 2008, the FAO estimated that roughly half of the world’s 523 assessed fishery stocks are “fully exploited,” meaning that they are harvested at rates near their maximum sustainable limits, while another 28% are “overexploited or depleted,” meaning that they are being harvested at rates not sustainable in the long term.¹ Even these numbers are uncertain and possibly conservative since they do not include many small-scale commercial and artisanal tropical fisheries; furthermore, these numbers do not include stocks that have already collapsed and been abandoned.

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=7962248&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=00ADEF&fullscreen=1

Coral reefs and climate change, a message for Copenhagen from Earth Touch on Vimeo.

Coral reefs are the most biologically diverse habitats of the oceans and face extinction due to climate change by 2050 … We’re hoping that the politicians and heads of state who attend the UNEP 2009 climate change conference in Copenhagen will make positive amendments to global environmental policy and help save coral reefs and ultimately protect the amazing planet we live on. (see more at www.sealthedeal2009.org and www.earth-touch.com

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Australian politicians are great. Malcolm Turnbull (the ex-leader of the opposition government who was recently ousted from his position) has called the new leader, Tony Abbott’s climate change policy “bullshit“. Tell us what you really think, Malcom? But it’s a fair point – this is Tony Abbot that yesterday declared:

“Notwithstanding the dramatic increases in man-made CO2 emissions over the last decade, the world’s warming has stopped,”

The world’s warming has stopped? Really? Wait, we’ve heard this one before. So has Tamino, who apparently is also sick of hearing that “the last decade of global temperature contradicts what was expected by mainstream climate scientists”. To illustrate this nicely, Tamino plotted the NASA GISS data from 1975-2000:

His solid red line is a linear regression, and the dashed lines 2 standard error (i.e. most data is expected to fall within these lines). So what happened after 2000? Were all the predictions wrong? Did we really see global cooling?

To quote Tamino:

Gosh. What actually happened is exactly what was expected. Exactly. By mainstream climate scientists. You know, those folks who keep telling us that human activity is warming the planet and that it’s dangerous.

We’re only 10 years into the 21st century, but so far, global temperature has done exactly what was expected by mainstream climate scientists. Exactly. You know — those folks who keep telling us that human activity is warming the planet, and that it’s very dangerous.

This is undeniable. Unless of course you’re in denial.

Yet people continue to deny it. They tell you it’s all a hoax, and to support that idea they repeatedly claim that the last decade of temperature data contradicts global warming.

Note to Tony Abbott: quit talking bullshit, stop peddling opinion as fact, and start being held accountable for every word you say as a politician.

The Republic of Palau, the island nation in the western Pacific, has banned shark fishing in its waters.  The overfishing of sharks, really the outright devastation of their populations, is one of the really big problems in marine conservation.  The causes run from the Steven Spielberg movie Jaws in 1975 (which turned the world against sharks and initiated global hunts, much like the crazed efforts to kill off wolves and panthers in the US) to the Asian market and appetite for shark fin soup.

Baum et al (2003) and many others have documented the collapse of shark populations and the many cascading effects removing top predators from ecosystems has.

Sept. 25 (Bloomberg) — The Pacific nation of Palau is creating the first shark sanctuary, banning commercial fishing of all sharks in its waters from vessels that hunt the predators for their fins, coveted in soups as an Asian delicacy.

Johnson Toribiong, president of the island republic, announced the commercial shark-fishing ban today at the United Nations General Assembly, saying “the strength and beauty of sharks are a natural barometer for the health of our oceans.”

Shark populations are in danger of collapse along with salmon and tuna commercial fisheries because of scant protective measures. Great whites, hammerheads and a third of deep-sea sharks and rays face extinction as fishing fleets trawling worldwide seek them for meat and fins, according to the Gland, Switzerland-based IUCN conservation group.

“The situation for sharks at the moment is catastrophic,” said Carl-Gustaf Lundin, head of marine conservation at the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. “Their populations around the world are at risk of collapse.”  Palau, with 20,000 inhabitants spread over about 200 islands, today formally established a France-sized area of sea banning shark hunting, setting up a protective zone to help preserve the predatory fish and support local tourism.

“Palau will become the world’s first national shark sanctuary,” Toribiong said, “ending all commercial shark fishing in our waters and giving a sanctuary for sharks to live and reproduce unmolested in our 237,000 square miles of ocean.”  Sharks often become snared in nets meant for tuna, which remain in high demand among consumers. About 10.7 million blue sharks are killed annually for their fins, many of which are sold at the Hong Kong shark fin market, according to a June report from IUCN.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XtpxUIxUtAE&w=425&h=344]

From DotEarth:  The Pacific island nation of Palau has declared all of its waters a sanctuary for sharks. The archipelago, famed among biologists and divers for its rich marine life, has seen increases in illegal shark fishing, driven by the high prices paid for shark fins in China. I met President Johnson Toribiong earlier this week as the United Nations climate summit ended, and he described the problems, which are particularly troublesome in a place where tourism revolving around reef diving is a top source of income.

Today, while addressing the U.N. General Assembly, he planned to announce a ban on all commercial shark fishing in Palau’s 242,858-square-mile exclusive economic zone, while also calling for a global moratorium on catching sharks only for their fins. Given that, for the moment, Palau has only one enforcement vessel to patrol an ocean zone a bit smaller than Texas, the challenge of turning a ban from rhetoric to reality remains. But Palau is getting significant support from private groups, particularly the Pew Charitable Trusts, which worked with groups and government officials in Palau to create the sanctuary plan.

Sadly, I am skeptical that such a proclamation can have much effect, given the industrial scale fishery for shark fins that has developed over the last decade.  And also the difficulty of monitoring such a large area to enforce the decree.  Shark fishing is in theory illegal within many large reserves like the Galapagos Marine Reserve, yet in reality, illegal shark fishing there, and elsewhere is common.

Jennifer Jacquet, who used to write the shifting baseline blog, recently published a paper on the surprisingly large size of the shark fishery in Ecuador alone:

Sharks never stop growing and neither does the Asian demand for sharkfin soup. Ecuador is one nation of many that feeds the demand for fins, and fishers there catch more than 40 different shark species. But shark catches have been considerably underreported worldwide. Until the 2005 update of fisheries data, the United Nations ood and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) did not report elasmobranches for Ecuador indicating that the Ecuadorian government did not report on these species. This study reconstructs Ecuador’s mainland shark landings from the bottom up from 1979 to 2004. Over this period, shark landings for the Ecuadorian mainland were an estimated 7000 tonnes per year, or nearly half a million sharks. Reconstructed shark landings were about 3.6 times greater than those retroactively reported by FAO from 1991 to 2004. The discrepancies in data require immediate implementation of the measures Ecuadorian law mandates: eliminating targeted shark captures, finning and transshipments, as well as adoption of measures to minimise incidental capture. Most of all, a serious shark landings monitoring system and effective chain of custody standards are needed.

Also see “Belize passes a law to limit the fishing of reef herbivores” here

References

Baum J.K., Myers R.A., Kehler D.G., Worm B., Harley S.J. & Doherty P.A. (2003) Collapse and conservation of shark populations in the Northwest Atlantic. Science, 299, 389-392

Jacquet, Jennifer, Juan Jose Alava, Ganapathiraju Pramod, Scott Henderson and Dirk Zeller. In hot soup: sharks captured in Ecuador’s waters. Environmental Sciences, Vol. 5, No. 4, December 2008, 269–283

I’ve often wondered whether people who eat tuna from a can have any idea what a tuna fish actually looks like? How does a can of tuna still cost less than a dollar? Mainly because the average tin of tuna comes from smaller and less tasty species (usually albacore or skipjack at roughly $25 per pound), which are still plentiful^* in the oceans as they require less resources to survive and reproduce. In contrast, the closely related southern bluefin tuna commands upwards of $350 per pound, yet is IUCN listed as ‘critically endangered’. With commercial extinction looming on the horizon, who will be the last person to eat a southern bluefin?

Bluefins are amazing animals. They can live for 40 years and attain weights of 1,600 pounds, yet they blast through the water at speeds in excess of 60 miles per hour. In other respects, they have everything going against them. The tuna grow slowly, and young females lay a only fraction the number of eggs that older ones do. They only have two spawning grounds, one in the Gulf of Mexico and one in the Mediterranean Sea, and when they are on them, tuna form tight schools, making them easy to catch.

Should bluefin disappear, much of the blame should go to an organization called the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT), although Carl Safina of the Blue Ocean Institute gave what some consider a more appropriate name, the International Conspiracy to Catch All Tuna. There are now only about 34,000 tuna swimming in the entire western Atlantic, down 82 percent from 1960s levels when the commission started “managing” the fishery.

“Looking at the science, there’s nothing else that makes any sense,” she said. “The current quota is driving the species to commercial extinction.”

Not that ICCAT ever pays much attention to science. “Last year ICCAT’s scientists said that the quota should be no higher than 15,000 metric tons,” said Lieberman. “So they went with 23,000 tons. In reality, with overfishing and illegal fishing, what they actually took is much higher. You can pretty much figure that it was double the quota. What we’re calling for is to suspend the fishery. Let it recover, and then you can go back to fishing. But there’s tremendous opposition, particularly from the European Union, to cutting anything.” (Read More)

* For albacore tuna, North Pacific biomass is 7% above the long-term average biomass for the exploitable stocks. South Pacific biomass is 33% above the biomass needed to support maximum sustainable yield

For anyone is the Brisbane area – Dr Charlie Veron will be speaking at City Hall as part of Run for a Safe Climate (betwen 5.30-7pm). In the leadup to Copenhagen, 35  emergency services workers are running from one end of Australia to the other. Find out more at www.runforasafeclimate.org

The Age newspaper, 9th November 2009

One of the world’s leading coral reef scientists has slammed the Brumby Government’s proposal to export Victoria’s brown coal to India as “reckless vandalism”.

John “Charlie” Veron, who discovered a quarter of the world’s identified coral species, said any move to export the state’s vast reserves of brown coal would only further endanger the Great Barrier Reef.

“It’s reckless vandalism. Brown coal would have to be the dirtiest, nastiest form of energy there is. It is absolutely essential that it remains in the ground. That is obvious,” he told The Age.

The Sunday Age revealed in September that Energy Minister Peter Batchelor had championed in a Cabinet committee a 40-year proposal to export 12 million tonnes of brown coal to India. Mr Brumby has said that, given environmental approval processes, there is no reason why Victoria should not export its coal. “Australia exports oil, Australia exports gas, Australia exports black coal and Australia exports uranium,” he said. “So why you would single out brown coal and say you can’t export that?”

But Dr Veron, the Townsville-based author of the three-volume Corals of the World, said that avoiding every tonne of carbon dioxide was now crucial to save the world’s reefs. Moreover, he said science had now shown that corals will struggle to survive with the carbon dioxide levels already in the atmosphere.

High levels of carbon dioxide – the world is currently at 378 parts per million of carbon dioxide – have two impacts on corals. As the globe warms, so too does the sea, which sparks coral bleaching. But scientists now understand that the bigger problem is ocean acidification, when the chemistry of the ocean changes because of the large amounts of carbon dioxide they absorb from the atmosphere. These changes reduce the ability of reefs to form and regrow after bleaching events.

Mr Veron, who recently gave a talk on climate change and corals at the Royal Society introduced by Sir David Attenborough, said the current targets the world’s politicians are talking about – 450 and 500 parts per million – would leave only “a very small band of ocean left in which corals can live”.

“They will struggle just to exist, let alone build reefs,” said Dr Veron, who has clocked 7000 hours of diving research on coral reefs.

Brown coal, which drives 90 per cent of the state’s power supply, has been unsuitable for export because it is unstable and flammable. But proponents say recent developments in technology will allow them to dry the coal, making it less polluting – equal to black coal – and safe to transport.

The company behind the plan to export brown coal to India, Exergen, is hopeful the Government will give it access to a new release of brown coal. The company expects to earn $700 million a year in export income for Victoria.

China may be coming around a bit on it’s role in CO2 emissions and global warming.  The giant nation of 1.3 billion people has long cried that it needed to maintain economic development and couldn’t commit to any serious future reductions in CO2 emissions.   In a speech yesterday at the UN, President Hu of China seemed to signal a new willingness to begin to tackle China’s growing role in global warming; “Developing countries need to strike a balance between economic growth, social development and environmental protection” .  Without significant participation by China (and India) most plans to curb global CO2 emissions are doomed.  China is now the world’s largest emitter of CO2 – yes, yes, north Americans emit far more per capita and the US is still the 2nd largest national emitter.  But the growth trends and predictions are sobering.

There is a lot of talk on this site about internal Australian plans to reduce emissions.  But from a global perspective, the world’s weather isn’t going to be affected by what Aussies do.   I think the more important question is how would the people and government of Australia feel about a substantial economic slow down in China for the sake of reducing global warming?  The Australian economy is very closely tied to the Chinese economic demand for natural resources.   Would Australia support an agreement at Copenhagen that was against their economic self interest?  What has the Australian govenment done in the past in response to China’s many sins?  e.g., Tiananmen, Tibet, etc.  I am guessing they kept quiet.

From a story last year, when China surpassed the US as the world’s largest emitter of CO2:

China set a new world record this year, surpassing the United States as the world’s biggest emitter of CO2 from power generation, according to new data from the Center for Global Development (CGD). But on a per capita basis, U.S. power-sector emissions are still nearly four times those of China.

The data, from the first annual update of CGD’s Carbon Monitoring for Action (CARMA) database, show that China accounts for more than half of the increase in global CO2 emissions due to power generation over the past year, mostly due to a surge in construction of new coal-fired plants.

According to the new CARMA data released today, Chinese power plants will produce about 3.1 billion tons of CO2 this year, up from about 2.7 billion tons in 2007. Power plants in the U.S will produce about 2.8 billion tons of CO2 this year, about the same as last year. If all power plants currently planned in China and the U.S. are eventually built, China’s power-related emissions will exceed those of the U.S. by 40 percent, although on a per capita basis the U.S. would still be the far-and-away the larger polluter from power production.

From the NYT

China is no longer pretending that it is a backward country whose need for economic growth relieves it of any obligation to control emissions. The United States — the world’s largest emitter in historical terms — is acknowledging its responsibility to help the poorest and most vulnerable nations reduce emissions without sacrificing growth

In his speech, [yesterday at the UN] President Hu of China said his nation would take four steps toward greener development. He said China would reduce the amount of carbon dioxide it emits to produce each dollar of gross domestic product by a “notable margin” by 2020 compared with 2005 levels; increase forests by 40 million hectares (about 98.8 million acres); increase nuclear or nonfossil fuels to 15 percent of power by 2020 and work to develop a green economy.

Analysts gave China credit for taking carbon emissions more seriously. Its leaders now accept the need to reduce pollution, partly because their country is vulnerable environmentally and partly because they hope to become leaders in green technology. But Mr. Hu neither defined “notable” nor accepted any binding cuts on emissions. He also tied the emissions reduction effort to the growth in China’s gross domestic product, so the amount of emissions per dollar of output — or “carbon intensity” — might shrink, but the overall number could still rise as the economy expanded.

“Developing countries need to strike a balance between economic growth, social development and environmental protection,” President Hu said.

Todd Stern, the United States envoy for climate change, reflected the general reaction to the Chinese proposal by saying, “That can be good, but it all depends on what the number is.”

And see the full story here and a related the editorial here

By Michael Vasquez, Miami Herald

Genetics professor Mahmood Shivji didn’t get into DNA research to strike fear in the hearts of restaurant owners and chefs. But the Guy Harvey Research Institute, which he heads, is a virtual CSI: Seafood lab these days. The widespread — and illegal — practice of fish substitution at restaurants has placed Shivji’s marine life genetics expertise in high demand.

In the last two years, Shivji has analyzed upward of 100 restaurant plates from across the country, more than half the time proclaiming that the dish was not the grouper or snapper specimen that diners thought they were eating. Instead, restaurants secretly served up cheaper fish such as catfish or tilapia.

“It’s consumer fraud,” said Shivji, who teaches at Nova Southeastern University. “You’re paying for item X and usually grouper and red snapper are on the higher end of the price list.”

With domestic grouper costing restaurants $11 or $12 a pound — and imported catfish available for a mere $2.50 a pound — unsavory chefs can profit handsomely from this unethical bait-and-switch.

Shivji has picked apart breaded fillets, fillets doused in sauce, even charred fillets left on the grill a little too long.

“We can tell with 100 percent certainty” whether restaurants are scamming, Shivji said. The professor’s initial interest in identifying fish through DNA came from his passion for conservation. The federal government was having a hard time enforcing protections for endangered shark species, for example, because rogue fishermen would chop up their illegal shark catches in ways that hid any identifying features.

But chopping up a fish can’t hide the DNA, Shivji reasoned. Shivji went on to pioneer a new way of testing shark DNA that has been instrumental in cracking down on the shark fin trade.

SCOPE OF PROBLEM

Enter CBS4’s Al Sunshine. Sunshine approached Shivji in 2007 with the idea to use the power of DNA to expose fish-swapping restaurants. Sunshine had to do a bit of arm-twisting to convince Shivji to run the first test, but Shivji’s skepticism melted as the evidence of rampant seafood fraud poured in.

“It just validates the argument that this is a national, if not international, problem,” Sunshine said.

Shivji’s phone was soon deluged with calls from TV reporters in other towns. Shivji dutifully accepted and tested their frozen fish samples — mailed in from places that included Los Angeles, New York and Charlotte, N.C.

Shivji has also fielded inquiries from an unidentified local fish wholesaler (who wanted to make sure his inventory was legit) and the Missouri attorney general’s office (which was investigating restaurants in Kansas City).

Fish mislabeling persists in part because it is virtually impossible for federal and state regulators to police all of the nearly five billion pounds of seafood consumed by Americans each year — more than 80 percent of which is imported.

Many restaurant patrons are also unfamiliar with the differences between species — they might order grouper simply because it’s a name they’ve heard before. “Most consumers can’t really tell the difference between a grouper and a catfish,” said Carlos Sanguily, vice president of Doral-based fish importer JC Seafood.

Aside from not getting what you pay for, fish mislabeling is a serious obstacle to ocean conservation efforts, Shivji said.

Read the full story here

And related stories here and here, a great story in the NYT about how sushi and seafood restaurants sell farm-raised salmon as wild (and got busted for doing so) and about the study that started it all, performed by by my former colleague Peter Mark and a team of UNC students!  here