Jennifer Jacquet
I am an American post-doc based at the University of British Columbia, where I also completed my Ph.D.
jjacquet
Posts by this author
January 24, 2008
Posted by Jack Sterne, jack@oceanchampions.org
Lots of interesting developments in the Gilchrest race this week.
The Politico has this story about the massive amount of direct mail being directed at Gilchrest by hard-core anti-environmentalist Andy Harris.
Gilchrest's other primary primary opponent…
January 23, 2008
The New York Times' Marian Burros has an article today on high mercury levels in tuna sushi:
Recent laboratory tests found so much mercury in tuna sushi from 20 Manhattan stores and restaurants that at most of them, a regular diet of six pieces a week would exceed the levels considered acceptable…
January 22, 2008
I got a tip on a Discovery show called Dirty Jobs that aired tonight and explored the slimy hagfishery off the coast of Maine. I was interested to see it but (I'll expose a little of my technological incompetence) was unable to download the software and so went in search of reviews. People seem…
January 22, 2008
A new campaign out from WWF that calls unsustainable fish "stinky" has caused some controversy among the seafood industry. Blogfish has more on the stink the campaign caused. Unfortunately, we can no longer view the video but I can't imagine how a hand puppet could make too much trouble...
January 21, 2008
The blogging conference in North Carolina--not to be confused with a flogging conference or a logging conference or a jogging conference--is over and I just wanted to share some reviews (due to the nature of the beast, it's been blogged left, right, and center). Check out these links:…
January 18, 2008
Each year, we grind up one-third of all ocean-caught fish to feed industrially raised pigs, chickens, and farmed fish. That's 30 million tonnes of fish turned into fishmeal and oil. What a waste.
So tomorrow at the Science Bloggers conference in North Carolina, Shifting Baselines will launch and…
January 18, 2008
Yesterday, the New York Times ran an article about how China Says Its Seafood Is Safer.
Regulators say that over the last year, more than 30,000 inspectors have fanned out across the country, working to close shoddy seafood operations and enforce regulations against the use of banned antibiotics,…
January 16, 2008
Yesterday, from Seafood.com News:
Scientists are criss-crossing the Irish Sea on ferries, counting stinger jellyfish which are blamed for wiping out salmon stocks...Scientists suspect global warming is the principal cause of the jellyfish shoals...The Natural Environment Research Council has given…
January 16, 2008
Remember a couple weeks ago how the California courts ruled to protect acoustic feeders and minimize Naval sonar use? Well, NRDC's Kate Wing just informed me that ruling is now being challenged by the Bush Administration who yesterday attempted to override the court ruling. According to NRDC, who…
January 16, 2008
Posted by Jack Sterne, jack@oceanchampions.org
I know I promised last week to talk about why we aren't planning to endorse anyone in the presidential race, but there's a Congressional primary coming up that really needs attention right now.
The Politico has a great story up about the primary race…
January 16, 2008
That's one thing they ground into our little brains in film school. Film is a visual medium. A good test of how well you understand that is to show your film with the volume off and see if the viewer gets the same basic story.
And that would be a good test for the 60 Minutes segment on bluefin tuna…
January 15, 2008
Two Sea Shepherd volunteers have been detained after boarding a Japanese whaler (first they were tied up to the ship). See the article and watch the video here.
January 15, 2008
European boats unfairly fishing in African waters have depleted local resources. Many African fishermen now have no fish and no hope, except in the prospects of a better life in Europe. The New York Times has more in a great article yesterday: Europe Takes Africa's Fish, and Boatloads of Migrants…
January 14, 2008
Last night 60 minutes aired a special on the King of Sushi, now available online. The presenter begins in Toykyo's Tsukiji market--a $4 billion per year fisheries trading post that Harvard anthropologist Ted Bestor describes as the "Wall Street of fish with no futures market." They watch as one…
January 14, 2008
To treat the "liquid highway" of storm runoff that drains into Chesapeake Bay after every storm, the U.S. Navy (likely the largest landowner in Chesapeake Bay) is changing the way it uses impervious surfaces. According to the Chesapeake Bay Journal:
The Naval Medical Center in Portsmouth, VA, was…
January 12, 2008
Japan may have given in on their hunt for humpbacks, but Sea Shepherd and Greenpeace will not rest just because the most charistmatic whales have been spared. Anti-whalers are out in Antarctic waters protesting the killing of minke and fin whales. Andrew Revkin has more on the hunt for the…
January 11, 2008
When fishing fanatic Sonia Ball lifted the crab pot out of the water she was disappointed to find its heavy weight was caused by a full load of jellyfish instead of the much-hoped-for mud crabs.That's the opening line on a story today from Australia. Read more here.
January 11, 2008
When I posted about the top shifting baselines stories of 2007, including the story on smaller Euro series spearguns (to shoot smaller fish), one kind reader wrote to me asking if I'd heard how, in 1996, the International Underwater Spearfishing Association reset world records, creating 20th…
January 9, 2008
Lots o' Wednesday morning quarterbacking going on regarding the NH primary victory of Ms. Clinton (NOT "Hillary", even though an awful lot of people say "Rudy"). We got lesson #1 in Mass Communications 101 class with the note that Ms. Clinton's choked up moment of spontaneity was powerful good…
January 9, 2008
If you're an academic, it's officially not cool to speak from your heart. Academics do their best to keep things in the head--away from the sincerity of the heart, the humor of the gut, and especially (yeeks) away from the potentially atomic power of the lower organs. But Hillary saw for herself in…
January 8, 2008
...make that baselines. Check out these stories from the last week alone.
A perennial favorite: high hopes for hagfish
Fishermen on Canada's East Coast are now considering harvesting hagfish and sea cucumber. Once the center of the cod industry, East Coast fishermen have already turned to sea…
January 8, 2008
Posted by Jack Sterne, jack@oceanchampions.org
With the rise of Barack Obama and Mike Huckabee, lots has been written about the emergence of "post-partisan" politics (see Washington Post article, or Bill Bradley's blog, to name a few). To me, the appeal of both candidates is that they are great…
January 7, 2008
Somewhere in China right now, there's a cannonball jellyfish from the waters off Panama City just waiting to be eaten. Jellyfish make for great story ledes, don't they? The article continues:
Shrimpers trying to stay afloat during the off season have been scooping them out of the gulf by the…
January 7, 2008
Surfrider's State of the Beach report is designed to encourage the measurement of "beach health indicators" to see if coastal zone management (CZM) programs are succeeding in their goals to balance conservation with economic development. In the 30 years of CZM, are things getting better or worse?…
January 5, 2008
The Golden Globes are so dumb. Not only are they holding the event (January 13th) in spite of the writer's strike, but they've decided to take the Patagonian toothfish (aka Childean sea bass) down with them (maybe it's a badly written joke?). That's right, this January 13th, attendees at the…
January 4, 2008
As the result of a NRDC lawsuit, a federal judge yesterday ordered the Navy to adopt measures for protecting marine mammals during midfrequency sonar exercises off San Diego County and other parts of Southern California. I wrote about the previous decision to overturn lowfrequency sonar use by the…
January 4, 2008
Goro Yoshizaki wants to breed bluefin tuna from mackerel, a technological challenge that Olivia Judson recently blogged about at the New York Times. She writes:
At first, I thought he was joking. After all, it's a bit like saying you want to breed elephants from hamsters. It's not just that tuna…
January 3, 2008
2007 was The Year of Climate Change. Scales were tipped, talks were commenced, and global warming became the new culprit of...everything. (Wait, didn't this happen in the 1980s?) I suppose the excuse of 9/11 was wearing thin. Plus, it was very hard to blame 9/11 for declining fish stocks. In…
January 3, 2008
As I've mentioned previously, Michael Pollan will release this month another book on "the tangible material formerly known as food." In Defense of Food grew out of his brilliant essay on nutritionism. Read an excerpt from the first chapter, a review of the book, and check out his book tour. And…
January 2, 2008
Jared Diamond has a great Op-Ed in the New York Times today comparing consumption between the developed and developing world. Thirty-two times. That's how many more resources we consume (the one billion people in developed countries) than the 5.5 billion people in developing nations. Gross, huh…