jjacquet | January 22, 2008A 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...
jjacquet | January 21, 2008The 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:
Aardvarchaeology's overview
Jennifer Ouellette's take on the Root of all Evil after the Framing Science talk
Our enthusiastic leader Bora's take on the event (plus photos)
Abel Pharmboy's take on framing science and herding cats
In my opinion, the best moment of the conference was Dave Munger's announcement of…
jjacquet | January 18, 2008Each 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 distribute the first 'Eat Like a Pig' seafood wallet cards.
Now in production: The 'Eat Like a Pig' seafood wallet card (front/back).
While I have written extensively about why consumers alone cannot save our fish, I hope this card can raise awareness (to the inexpensive tune of $20 for 1000 cards…
jjacquet | January 18, 2008Yesterday, 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, like chloramphenicol and malachite green, which is thought to cause cancer.
Despite those concerns, China's booming aquaculture business grew by $8.7billion last year. The article has some good insights into Chinese politics and even comes with a sprinkling of shifting baselines:
...regulators were…
jjacquet | January 16, 2008Yesterday, 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 an emergency grant of [$100,000] to launch a study of the jellyfish.
Recall that smack of jellies that killed all 100,000 fish in an Irish Sea salmon farm. But hold up. What's this about "salmon stocks"? The reporter is saying a bunch of salmon trapped in cages with no escape from stinging…
jjacquet | January 16, 2008Remember 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 instigated the original lawsuit:
In an effort to nullify measures established to protect marine mammals from potentially lethal sound blasts, President Bush gave the Navy an unprecedented waiver under the Coastal Zone Management Act (CZMA), and allowed the Navy a second "emergency" waiver under the…
jjacquet | January 16, 2008Posted 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 being faced by Rep. Wayne Gilchrest (R-Md.), one of the best Republican champions the oceans have in Congress ("Maryland incumbent receives right jab").
Gilchrest is one of a dying breed - the moderate Republicans - and he's frequently been out of step with his party on environmental issues (he once…
jjacquet | January 16, 2008That'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. Take a look at it with the volume off. All you see is bountiful boatloads of happy fishermen with mountains of tuna. If you didn't hear the host say the tuna stocks were running out, you'd never know it.
Why would they do that? Because its a visual medium, and the producers select the shots…
jjacquet | January 15, 2008Two 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.
jjacquet | January 15, 2008European 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 Follow.
jjacquet | January 14, 2008Last 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 450-lb. bluefin is brought in its 'tuna coffin' (see image) and then sold for $8500. But where is the tuna coming from?
Next stop is the Mediterranean to witness the Mattanza or annual tuna slaughter. The tonnaras, a complex system of nets to catch tuna as well as a thousand-year-old right of…
jjacquet | January 14, 2008To 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 recognized by the Elizabeth River Project for its use of nearly 38,000 square feet of pervious pavers that reduced traditional paved surfaces by 10 percent.
Old baseline: All natural
New baseline: All concrete
Award winning: 10 percent less concrete
Prize winning pervious pavers.
Awards for less…
jjacquet | January 12, 2008Japan 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 hunters at Dot Earth, a blog of the New York Times.
jjacquet | January 11, 2008When 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.
jjacquet | January 11, 2008When 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 century records and a new 21st century category.
I had not.
And I'm floored. The world record reset is likely a result of most fish getting smaller and changes in species for which hunting is encouraged. Here is a quote from the IUSA:
As part of the reorganization, the Board of Directors had to address…
jjacquet | January 9, 2008Lots 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 stuff for the last minute folks who were still making up their mind. Now comes Mass Communications 101 lesson #2, compliments of conservative guru Karl Rove (a.k.a. Dr. Really Evil) who notes the flip side of the dynamics--that Obama probably turned off a lot of people with his smarminess in the last…
jjacquet | January 9, 2008If 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 New Hampshire this week the power of the heart.
You wanna save the oceans? Find yourself a genuine (un-phony and contrived) pathway to the heart. And you'll notice that her "heart moment" was not the carefully scripted work of a committee. It was her, letting go and being human.
Little known…
jjacquet | 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 urchin, toad crab and rock crab in the wake of overfishing and the cod's collapse. Now they have high hopes for hagfish. The best line in the article comes from Scott Grant, a fisheries biologist in St. John's with the Marine Institute at Memorial University who has helped develop the new harvests…
jjacquet | January 8, 2008Posted 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 communicators who have picked up on the fact that lots of people in this country are tired of slash and burn politics.
Even though they both have records that could easily be characterized as "extreme" by their opponents (Obama has very high "liberal" voting scores in the Senate, while Huckabee is a…
jjacquet | January 7, 2008Somewhere 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 thousands since September. The gelatinous masses have turned out to be a profitable commodity on the Asian market, once they are processed into crispy protein wafers.
"Cannonball is a whole new business to us," said 68-year-old shrimp boat operator Steve Davis. "We used to run from them when we were…