The authors presented their findings at 11th International Coral Reef Symposium in Fort Lauderdale, Florida - which you already heard a bit about from Jennifer. The impacts are clear - and it's becoming clear that those impacts are more often than not underestimated. Now we need some solutions.
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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.
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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.
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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
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More Bad News - Overfishing
Category: New Research
Posted on: July 15, 2008 11:14 PM, by Josh Donlan
Comments
thanks...
Posted by: hekimboard | July 16, 2008 3:17 AM
Was just in Kenya in May, including some time on the coast south of Mombasa. Could see this myself, and had complaints from a number of locals that the near-coast fishing that they did with hand-lines was disappearing. It puts more and more pressure on the land resources, as the sea resources disappear. Plus, growing poverty hardly helps political stability. But Kenya have no money (or say they have no money) to even patrol to see how many foreign fishing boats are even physically in their waters, much less regulate how much they take; it's a free-for-all, essentially.
However, they will not ban foreign fishing from their waters, (a) because they also have no way to prevent them from being there, and (b) they want what money they can get, and don't see that they have a strong bargaining position to demand more, since the European countries will just say they have negotiated fishing rights with the neighbouring countries and will continue to take from those waters. How can this be addressed?
Posted by: Luna_the_cat | July 17, 2008 6:29 AM
I get the impression that most of the unreported catch is attributable to artisanal, subsistence and recreational fisheries. This really begs for greater involvement by locals (fishermen, consumers & other stakeholders) in developing management policy. These are the folks most directly involved and those with the most to offer in terms of improving catch statistics.
I'd like to see a discussion of what folks think fisheries should look like in 20 years. Clearly there's much to be desired regarding the current state of affairs. There are increasing calls for EBFM, but this is usually vaguely defined at best and often lacking detailed objectives. It'd be interesting to approach this both from the top down and the bottom up: What should the upper limit be on the protein we take from the world's oceans? How would we integrate science, management and fisheries into a policy that meets that objective? From the bottom up, I think it'd be instructive to develop policy at the community level, working with fishermen, scientists, and consumers with a similar objective: given an initial cap on the biomass to be removed locally, how would you limit capitalization (or handle the 'excess' fishermen)?
Obviously there are a lot of details that need addressing here (eg how would you distribute take across tropic levels?), but it'd be an interesting exercise. One might predict that the top down approach would lead to large, highly efficient fishing vessels (seiners, trawlers--greatest capture efficiency?), and the bottom up would favor small boats with more selective gear (greater productivity for a given impact?).
Posted by: Pete Nelson | July 18, 2008 5:01 PM
I'm not sure about the tropic levels and all that (I'm not a scientist), but I'd like to put in a plug for Oceans 21, a bill now langushing in Congress, as it applies to our own waters. Apparently, the NOAA would be in charge of regulating fishing, creating protected areas and generally using science to determine ocean policy rather than the almighty dollar. Wouldn't that be an improvement!
Posted by: gmeadows | August 1, 2008 10:45 PM