Articles by Andrew Sharpless

Billions of taxpayer dollars are helping destroy African waters

After exhausting commercial seafood stocks off their own shores decades ago, wealthy nations turned their bows toward the pristine populations off the coast of Africa. In the 1990s, the European Union took more than a million pounds of fish out of African waters annually; the former Soviet states took about 2.5 million pounds. The result has been predictable: a steep decline in biomass along the African coast.

Meanwhile, African nations took a sliver of their own fish. According to a 2002 report in Marine Policy, Guinea Bissau earned just 7 percent of the gross returns on fishing off its coast, while the E.U. got the other 93 percent.

Whales on treadmills and dolphin harassment

New Zealand installed its first acoustic fish fence, designed to herd salmon smolt in the right direction during migration ...

... Polish fishermen who obeyed a ban on cod will receive up to $11,000 in revenue lost, but those who defied the ban will face fines up to $7,500 ...

... salmon returns for the year in Vancouver were called "dismal" ...

... for the first time, scientists were able to estimate how much a fin whale can swallow in one lunge for krill, finding that they engulf 2,900 cubic feet in a single gulp -- the equivalent of the volume of a school bus. Measuring the amount is tricky, said one scientist, because "you can't get whales to run on a treadmill in a laboratory" ...

Better management is needed before closing fisheries is the only option left

About thirty years ago, diners around the world developed a taste for the low-fat white meat of a large pelagic fish known as a slimehead. The name was changed to orange roughy, and a delicacy was born.

Unfortunately for the orange roughy, its long lifespan (a hundred years or more) and its late arrival to sexual maturity (at 20 years or more) has made it vulnerable to overfishing. As its popularity in fine restaurants has grown, orange roughy populations have nosedived. And just this week, Australia and New Zealand (the world's largest producer of orange roughy, while the U.S. is the largest consumer) agreed to close a large orange roughy fishery in the Southern Ocean, with managers saying they're not sure when or if the area may ever reopen to fishing because of the damage done.

It doesn't have to come to this. With responsible fishing techniques and sustainable quotas, rare and increasingly rare commercial fish like the roughy, bluefin tuna, Patagonian toothfish (Chilean sea bass), and more can thrive.

Rogue flying fish and the ‘big, blue rubbish bin’

Ireland was poised to ask the European Union to permanently ban deep-sea fishing off the country's Atlantic coast to protect coldwater coral reefs ...

... the E.U. completed negotiations with non-E.U. member state Norway for 2008, allowing Norway and the E.U. to increase their North Sea cod catch by 11 percent in exchange for the E.U. reducing its cod discards, or unwanted bycatch, to 10 percent ...

... a marine scientist called for a worldwide oceans monitoring system, including tagged marine creatures and robot submarines, in order to protect humanity from an ocean-based disaster ...