Shifting Baselines : Live from Durban

The Shifting Baselines Blog

Jennifer Jacquet is a Ph.D. candidate with the Sea Around Us Project at the UBC Fisheries Centre. She works closely with Dr. Daniel Pauly, who coined the term Shifting Baselines, the syndrome on which this blog focuses.
Josh Donlan is a conservation scientist and a Visting Fellow at Cornell University. He often hides out in the backcountry of the Teton Mountains, pondering bygone giant beavers and ground sloths. He also is also the founder and Director of Advanced Conservation Strategies and has a habit of restoring remote islands.

Scientist turned filmmaker Randy Olson, founder of the Shifting Baselines Ocean Media Project is also a blog contributor.

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New Projects & Publications

November 2008 Jennifer Jacquet is lead author of the study In hot soup: sharks captured in Ecuador's waters published in Environmental Sciences.

November 27, 2008: Jennifer Jacquet gives the talk "Why Consumers Alone Can't Save Our Fish" at 1pm at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, B.C.

August 2008: Josh Donlan is co-author on a new paper titled Integrating invasive mammal eradications and biodiversity offsets for fisheries bycatch: conservation opportunities and challenges for seabirds and sea turtles published in Biological Invasions.

August 2008: Jennifer Jacquet is co-author on a new paper titled Funding Priorities: Big Barriers to Small-Scale Fisheries published in Conservation Biology.

August 2008: Josh Donlan is an author on a new paper in Journal of Applied Ecology titled Diversity, invasive species, and extinctions in insular ecosystems.

July 26, 2008: Randy Olson's film Sizzle premieres on the East Coast at the Woods Hole Film Festival in MA.

July 24, 2008: Josh Donlan gives a talk on biodiversity offsets to The Alcoa Foundation and the Alcao Intalco Aluminum Plant in Bellingham, Washington.

July 22, 2008: Jennifer Jacquet gives the talk "A Way Forward in a Sea of Market Based Initiatives to Save Wild Fish" at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, CA.

July 19, 2008: Randy Olson's film Sizzle premieres on the West Coast at Outfest in Hollywood, CA.

July 17, 2008: Jennifer Jacquet gives the talk "In Hot Soup: Shark's Captured in Ecuador's Waters" at the Society for Conservation Biology Annual Meeting in Chattanooga, TN.

July 9, 2008: Jennifer Jacquet gives the talk "Flawed Data, Reef Fisheries, And Food Security: A Close Inspection Of Marine Fisheries Catches in Mozambique, Tanzania, Fiji, And The Solomon Islands" at the 11th International Coral Reef Symposium in Ft. Lauderdale, FL.

June/July 2008: Josh Donlan attends training for his Kinship Conservation Fellowship in Bellingham, WA.

May 2008: Josh Donlan is an author on a new paper in Ambio titled High impact Conservation: Invasive Mammal Eradications from the Islands of Western Mexico.

May 15, 2008: Jennifer Jacquet reviews Bottomfeeder: How to Eat Ethically in a World of Vanishing Seafood at the Tyee.

April 2008: Trade Secrets: Renaming and Mislabeling of Seafood by Jennifer Jacquet and Daniel Pauly is published in Marine Policy.

April 2008: Randy Olson and the Puget Sound Partnership release the flash video Shifting Baselines in the Sound:.

Mar. 2008: Dr. Josh Donlan joins the Shifting Baselines blog.

Jan. 2008 Jennifer Jacquet launches the Eat Like a Pig Seafood Wallet Card

Online Resources and Blogs

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Live from Durban

Category: New Research
Posted on: October 23, 2007 4:43 AM, by Jennifer L. Jacquet

Here at the WIOMSA conference. This morning a woman delivered a nice talk about artisanal fishing in Rodrigues. My first thought: Rodrigwhere? (Turns out, Rodrigues is an autonomous island of Mauritius.) She studies the seine fishery in one of the lagoons and had an excellent data set for the last five years (excellent in terms of the quality of the data, not the disconcerting results). She showed 1) the fishery system is dominated now by herbivorous fish (there probably used to be more predators) 2) the majority of all the species caught were juveniles (66-98%, depending on the species) and that catch per unit effort has declined over the five year time period.

In conclusion: there's Malthusian overfishing (too many fishers + destructive gear), fishing down marine food webs (to an ecosystem dominated by low trophic feeders), and growth overfishing (catching too many juveniles). Four new MPAs is the hope on which Rodrigues has hung his hat.

South Africa's Deputy Minister of Environmental Affairs also gave a heartening introduction to the conference by talking about the need for scientists to communicate not only to one another at conferences but to rural communities. She suggested scientists volunteer as guests on their local radio stations and talk casually about their research in the local language (there are 11 official languages in South Africa alone).

That's assuming the WIOMSA scientists live to tell their tales. Apparently, Durban's earned a surly reputation over the last few years as crime spills over from Jo'berg. Some of the Spanish visitors to the WIOMSA conference were already mugged at knifepoint. Aside from giving talks, these marine scientists are earning some street cred.

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