Shifting Baselines : Et Tu Pollock?

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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Et Tu Pollock?

Category: New Research
Posted on: October 14, 2008 4:47 PM, by Jennifer L. Jacquet

Pollock, the poster child for sustainable fishing, appears to be on the brink of collapse. I have more on the state of Bering Sea pollock fishery in my guest post at the Gristmill...

Find more posts in: Environment

Comments

There was an excellent TV program about the factory ship fishery for pollock a couple of months back. Very interesting and scarily impressive. They were harvesting pollock by the jillion tons per trawl, and completely processing them assembly line fashion. Absolutely no waste; everything completely processed into a saleable product and packaged ready to sell. Boxes of processed and frozen McDonald fish squares ready to ship, bags of fish meal, etc. The gonads were harvested, frozen and packaged for shipment to Japan. I think they got $250 a pound for them. The rest of the catch was the break-even and the gonads were the profit. Maybe you can find the program on the internet.

Posted by: Jim Thomerson | October 14, 2008 6:31 PM

Isn't it a bit alarmist to conclude that a fishery is on the brink of collapse from one bad year? Populations, like stock markets, go up and down.

Posted by: Bob O'H | October 14, 2008 10:20 PM

I commented on this at "The Intersection", but I'll reiterate that in order to save the fisheries, the massive overconsumption of imperiled seafood species by societies in which seafood consumption is traditional (Japan takes the lead, but Spain is another major player) must be significantly reduced. Otherwise, they will revisit the "Tragedy of the Commons" on numerous fisheries, as has already happened for those (like Grand Banks cod) that have collapsed.

Posted by: Oakden Wolf | October 21, 2008 7:16 AM