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
December 9, 2007
Earlier this year supermarkets removed monkfish from their menus admist concerns about depleted populations. Now, thanks to shifting baselines, monkfish is not overfished after all. According to an article at Seafood.com News published on Friday:
A new monkfish stock assessment has concluded that…
December 9, 2007
Warmer waters bring wads of jellies.
Global warming seems to be nurturing a worldwide explosion of jellyfish, not only allowing greater numbers of jellies to survive through the winter but also heating up north Atlantic waters where conditions are becoming favorable for Mediterranean jellyfish to…
December 6, 2007
I was raised in the teeny town of Granville, Ohio. There were 112 kids in my graduating class and only one high school in the town. So you can imagine my surprise when, during my visit to the Jackson Hole Wildlife Film Festival back in October, I ran into an old high school friend, Melissa…
December 5, 2007
A little bit of housecleaning here at Shifting Baselines. First, Sea Shepherd, the anti-whalers preparing for their campaign against Japanese whalers right now in Australia, have named one of their two boats after Steve Irwin, the deceased Crocodile Hunter. Over at Grist, Erik Hoffner has a nice…
December 5, 2007
Posted by Jack Sterne, jack@oceanchampions.org
I have to confess, I got nothin' this week.
Oh sure, there were articles this week in the New York Times on how red tide is causing major problems for California sea lions, and plenty of gloom and doom in other areas. Although the global warming…
December 5, 2007
An evening with Yann Martel
Yann Martel, author of Life of Pi, spoke on campus last night and I was smart enough to attend. I cannot possibly impart all of his wisdom here so I'll give you what I found to be the most interesting snippets. My own wisdom: if you haven't read Life of Pi, please do.…
December 4, 2007
From 1998-2000, the Give Swordfish a Break campaign requested that chefs boycott swordfish until the international fishery commission cut quotas--700 chefs joined in. Here in Vancouver, a sustainable seafood event doesn't happen without the involvement of chefs. Since it opened, there have been a…
December 3, 2007
Friday night I went to the opening of Cameron MacDonald's "Catch of the day" exhibit at Little Mountain Studios here in Vancouver. The walls were covered in large-scale drawings of fantasy fish on 500 feet of thermal fax paper and there were several framed faux nutrition labels.
The new exhibit…
December 2, 2007
Dead on arrival.
November was the month for Atlantic bluefin tuna. Well, it could have been. The New York Times was optimistic but alas, after a week of debates in Turkey, the international tuna commission, in its brilliance, decided to increase the quota for bluefin by 1000 tonnes.
The bluefin…
November 30, 2007
An excerpt from a 1933 article in the journal Nature--imagine seeing a passage like this today:
In the spring of 1933, while Mr. Vincent Astor of New York was cruising among the Galapagos Islands, a specimen of this huge fish was seen and captured...It was swimming at the surface but sounded…
November 30, 2007
Last week while I was home for U.S. Thanksgiving, I missed this event for Sounds Like Canada on CBC. David Suzuki, Canadian environmental hero, and his daughter, Sarika Cullis-Suzuki (also a student of Daniel Pauly's) spoke in front of a crowd of 250 people about climate change, fisheries, and…
November 29, 2007
That's the question posed by an article in today's New York Times. The answer? Probably NO, but the article explores the role of high end marketing in the environmental crisis and is worth a visit--if only just for the photos. In shishi corners of our society, rich designers are doing their part…
November 29, 2007
Does anyone have anything that can compete with:
Georgia Cannonball Jellyfish Trawl Fishery?
p.s. This is an experimental mid-water trawl fishery that has recently started up off the Atlantic seaboard. We can expect (as the posts below attest) more jellyfisheries in the future.
November 28, 2007
And just in case there are some of there out there who agree with the statement from Wikipedia: "There is very little reason or evidence to suppose that Jellyfish even require a collective noun." This important article, Invasion of Jellyfish Envelops Japan in Ocean of Slime in yesterday's Wall…
November 28, 2007
Last night at dinner, I asked whether a group of jellyfish was called a 'smuck' or a 'smack' to settle the debate on the blog last week. Though Wikipedia cites collective jellies as a 'smack', the three scientists I was eating with agreed it was 'smuck' and we even went to a big, tattered 1993…
November 28, 2007
To eBook or not to eBook? That is the question. I am particularly curious how authors feel about eBooks. Recall the singers' rebellion (revolution?) against Napster and other music sites, despite the fact that singers make most of their money off performing. Could the eBook jeopardize the writer's…
November 27, 2007
Posted by Jack Sterne, jack@oceanchampions.org
When you hear the news that Sen. Trent Lott (R-MS) is retiring from the Senate at the end of the year, you might not think that has anything to do with the oceans. But, oh does it.
In the first place, Sen. Lott has always been terrible on fisheries…
November 26, 2007
Would sexier oceans get a bigger budget?
In 2006, the U.S. alone spent an estimated $13.3 billion on the sex and porn industry. Worldwide, it was estimated sex industry sales were $97 billion.
Meanwhile, as of 1999, the entire world was spending only about $6 billion on nature reserves globally.…
November 23, 2007
That's smuck, not schmuck. And it's the official term for a swarm of jellyfish, according to Jonathan in the last jellyfish post. The name was just created in 2000 (the need for a name for a swarm of jellyfish, just another shifting baseline). Apparently, after wiping out Northern Ireland's only…
November 22, 2007
Recently, the NGO Oceana distributed subsidy snowglobes to WTO delegates from 150 nations. The subsidy globes each contain one fish, one factory fishing boat, and with a little agitation, lots of lots of coins that reign down on both. An index card of facts comes with the globe. The first fact: "…
November 22, 2007
In what was probably the largest Thanksgiving feast this week, a swarm of billions of jellyfish attacked a salmon farm in Northern Ireland yesterday and ate $2 million worth of fish. Jellyfish and slime are taking over the oceans, just as Dr. Jeremy Jackson always warns. Billions of jellyfish…
November 20, 2007
If you stop by Amazon, you'll see Jeff Bezos has launched their latest product: Kindle. Jeff promises that "reading on Kindle is nothing like reading on a computer screen." Weighing in at less than a paperback (but costing much more: $399) and with room for 200 novels, Kindle (and the other many…
November 20, 2007
Posted by Traci Reid, traci@oceanchampions.org
On Nov. 7 more than 58,000 gallons of oil spilled into the San Francisco Bay, killing coastal birds, closing fisheries, and making lots of 5:00 news programs. Over the last two weeks the spill has spread beyond the Bay and into coastal waters…
November 20, 2007
The Japanese government has decided to go hunting for humpbacks, something they have not done since the 1960s. People here and at Deep Sea News don't seem too happy about the hunt. Some people are also discomforted by Paul Watson and his group, Sea Shepherd. In reponse to the recent decision by…
November 19, 2007
Chuck Hesse wrote to the Tallahassee Democrat this past weekend about shifting baselines and Wakulla Springs, FL. Here is what he wrote:
Shifting baselines erase natural beauty
Each individual has a baseline, or initial image, which is set the first time an area is seen; so your first visit to…
November 19, 2007
Kits = Kitslano = Hipster neighborhood lining beautiful False creek here in Vancouver, aka "Hipslano". Manhattan has Prada, Beverly Hills has Louis Vuitton and Kitslano has Lululemon. Lululemon Athletica is high-end designer yoga wear and, since it went public in July, its shareholders have been…
November 19, 2007
I am nearing the end of Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine, which I was at first reluctant to read. Though I found the topic compelling (and thoroughly admired No Logo), I had heard Klein speak on the subject at Seattle's Town Hall and found her disappointingly short on information (very unlike her…
November 18, 2007
Last week, I heard zoologist Chris Harley speak on how climate change will affect intertidal diversity along our rocky shores. There was a typo in his poster ("acification" instead of "acidification") and he said he would like to officially coin assification for what we're collectively doing to…
November 18, 2007
According to BBC news, a Japanese fleet has instructions to kill 1,000 whales, including 50 humpbacks, which have been spared from hunting since the 1960s. A 2003 study in Science estimated there used to 240,000 humpbacks in the North Atlantic pre-whaling. Now there are 10,000. Can anyone help…
November 18, 2007
The video of the Polish immigrant Robert Dziekanski, age 40, being tasered to death at the Vancouver airport was released this weekend. I'd expect something like this to come out of the U.S. (certainly the U.S.-led occupation in Iraq) but to see this man tasered to death by the RCMP in Canada is…