jjacquet | January 13, 2009We need to pay closer attention to how hunting and fishing regulations are set or we may end up with unintended negative consequences for the species we are trying to protect. This according to new research reported in The New York Times. We know that target species can react to increased predation by humans (which is far different from the type of predation that occurs in the wild, where predators prefer the young and dying). We saw this in the cod fishery when cod evolved to reproduce at younger ages and smaller sizes. Daniel Pauly, the father of shifting baselines, is also quoted in…
jjacquet | January 13, 2009Yesterday, the New York Times ran a profile of Sylvia Earle and the marine environment, which included some wonderful photographs and a nice introductory anecdote about how, in 1953, when Earle began studying algae, the marine plants and related microbes were often considered weeds or worse. Today, Earle says that one type -- Prochlorococcus -- releases countless tons of oxygen into the atmosphere and provides the oxygen for "one in every five breaths we take." Read the full article here.
jjacquet | January 5, 2009Check out this video shot in the Sea of Cortez a friend from the Surfrider Foundation sent along. It is a great reminder of the magnificent life that still exists in the ocean. But can you imagine what it was like 200 years ago?
jjacquet | January 5, 2009Check out this magnificent and convincing collection panoramic photographs of receding glaciers over the decades...
rolson | December 20, 2008When Oppenheimer watched the atomic bomb go off he felt he had played a part in the destruction of humanity. I know the feeling.
Last week I got a nice email from a group of graduate students in marine ecology at Northeastern University who apparently are losing their minds as badly as I did in the early 90s. They sent me links to these two videos which they said were inspired by my early Prairie Starfish videos (particularly Barnacles Tell No Lies I'm guessing). But these folks have taken it to "a ho nuva leva." They've figured out ways to rap about everything from trochophores to veligers…
rolson | December 20, 2008...That's what you get when the ocean is infer-e-yah.
We sang about it six years ago. In 2002 we made a Flash video in which we said, "A new term for the new millennium:Â Jellyfish blooms." And now our dire predictions appear to be coming true, around the world.
They'll sting your knees, and cause disease.
jjacquet | December 17, 2008I am the lead author of a new study In Hot Soup: Sharks Captured in Ecuador's Waters out in the journal Environmental Sciences. We reconstructed the shark landings for Ecuador from 1976 to 2004 and demonstrated that Ecuador captures more than 3.5 times the number of sharks they officially report catching--or about half a million sharks each year.
The shark fishery of Ecuador is one of many around the world that feeds the growing Asian demand for sharkfin soup. Fishermen catch more than 40 different shark species and one need only visit a few of the fishing ports along the coast to see shark…
rolson | December 9, 2008This is rather distressing. It doesn't sound like there has been any sort of major, published, peer-reviewed, quantitative documentation of this yet. But that said, something is not right when so many sport divers not only count dozens of dead or dying eels (the diver on this blog itemized in detail 50 encounters with dead eels), but even post video footage of one writhing in what looks to be the death throes.
In all the thousands of hours I've logged diving on Caribbean coral reefs I've never once seen a dead or dying eel. It's a rather disturbing mystery for now.
Did we do something…
jjacquet | December 9, 2008Everywhere I turn it seems to be bad news for poster fish species. Bluefin tuna are in a bad way. And let's not forget pollock, the world's largest food fishery. This year, conservation groups and scientists feel the catch limits are being set anywhere from two to three times too high. Greenpeace has gone so far as to release a television public service announcement in Seattle and Anchorage last week to call attention to the problem with pollock...
jjacquet | December 6, 2008In my Topics in Marine Science class that I teach at Western Washington University, we spend a week on marine mammals and a portion of that time talking about whaling. We discuss the use of whale oil for illuminants, the 1930s as the Whaling Olympic era, the devastation of certain whale populations, and the formation of the International Whaling Commission (IWC). We examine the shift in values as a world that was largely pro-whaling became largely anti-whaling and how science (e.g., the discovery of whale song) and conservation (e.g., Greenpeace) played a role in that ethical shift.
I ask…
jjacquet | November 30, 2008Andrew Revkin has the disheartening news from the ICCAT meetings this week with insights from Carl Safina. Surprise, surprise. Tuna are still in trouble as ICCAT continues to set a quota much higher than what scientists recommend. Here is Safina's take on it all:
What's really needed is a moratorium for bluefin, and I first said that in 1991. That's the bluefin situation. I must say that based on their whole history I would have been astounded if I.C.C.A.T. had set an eastern quota that complied with the science. I'm ashamed of what they do, but no longer surprised.
jjacquet | November 28, 2008Food is the name of the game this week (well, food, and trampling store employees on Black Friday). And friend and fellow Ph.D. student here at UBC, Jeremy Goldbogen (photographed with a minke whale jaw bone), has some new research out this week on the feeding habits of humpback whales and it dons the cover of the current issue of The Journal of Experimental Biology. Jeremy and his colleagues found that lunge-feeding requires a large amount of energy compared to other behaviors--humpback whales breathe three times harder after returning to the surface from a foraging dive than from singing…
jjacquet | November 25, 2008Randy Olson travels a lot these days, and frequently calls me from airports to whine about how much he hates to travel. Randy, this clip of stand up comedian Louis CK talking about how times have changed is for you (with thanks to Dale of Faith in Honest Doubt for titling this piece with the symptom it describes: shifting baselines).
jjacquet | November 24, 2008A.O. Scott had a nice piece in this weekend's New York Times Magazine on The Screening of America. In spite of all the technological advances, he believes the cinema is far from finished:
What will happen, in the age of iPod, DVR, VOD, YouTube and BitTorrent, to the experience of moviegoing, to say nothing of the art of cinema? The answer does not seem to be that people will stop going to the movies. Nothing has stopped us before -- certainly not the rise of television in the late 1940s or the spread of home video in the early '80s. While both of those developments appeared to threaten the…
jjacquet | November 23, 2008Christmas is around the bend and the oceans have one gift that keeps on giving: jellyfish. If you're inspired by these ever-increasing medusas (they seem to be on the rise even on land) and you already have the jellyfish moodlamp like me (thanks, sister), here is a relevant gift idea: jellyfish glass.
jjacquet | November 17, 2008In his New York Times article, A Seafood Snob Ponders the Future of Fish, Mark Bittman laments the bygone days of "fishermen unloading boxes of flounder at the funky Fulton Fish Market" and seems annoyed at the fact most most fish on the menus these days are farmed. He should be. For one, the fishmeal industry is horrendous. For two, seafood is one of the last wild food sources we eat with any regularity aside from mushrooms. Bittman remains optimistic about the future for fish and adamant about his stance on the farmed vs. wild debate; he would "rather eat wild cod once a month and…
jjacquet | November 14, 2008I really like plaid. But I am not a hipster. I wish I were because then I would have more photographs of myself and would ride a nice bicycle.
I think it is a partial combination of growing up in the Midwest and my love for higher education that has rendered me a mere observer of the hipster movement. People where I am from wear plaid to farm, not skateboard.
It doesn't matter.
The point is, until today, I watched the hipster movement from the sidelines. Collected a few hipster friends. Read about hipsters in hip magazines, including Douglas Haddow's recent piece in Adbusters. I noticed…
jjacquet | November 9, 2008You know I appreciate a lot of the work Greenpeace does in the seafood market (for instance, chiding retailers and sabotaging seafood expos). This week, they've done it again. Greenpeace erected 'crime scenes' at 8 Loblaw grocery stores in Toronto with the message "caught red-handed selling Redlist fish." The following day, according to Intrafish news service, Loblaw officials were reportedly "disappointed" but said they would work to offer more MSC-certified fish.
Also, The Vancouver Sun reports this week that dogfish fishermen off the coast of British Columbia saying the market for…
jjacquet | November 7, 2008My local paper, The Vancouver Sun, ran a great 5-part series on the oceans this week written by Larry Pynn titled Shifting Seas.
Part One gives an overview of fishing (both past and present) on the British Columbia coast. Part Two is all about the B.C. trawl fishery and their movement to buy and sell catch shares. This new approach to regulating the fishery means the little guys are gone but the fishery is supposedly better managed (given the obscene amounts of bycatch, I'm not sure it qualifies as well managed).
Part 3 presents the dismal state of commercial sockeye fishing while Part 4…