oceans

The continuing quest to find something, anything to bash Gore with

People magazine reports that Al Gore’s daughter Sarah just got married, revealing in the course of the article that Chilean sea bass was served at the rehearsal dinner. In the Daily Telegraph, Australian Humane Society Rebecca Keeble writes that “only one week after Live Earth, Al Gore’s green credentials slipped.” Why? Because Chilean sea bass […]

Unsustainability in the water

Poor African countries have been selling their fishing rights to richer countries for years, and now they can neither catch enough fish for their populations nor protect their fisheries from collapsing. In today's Wall Street Journal (behind a subscriber wall), the grim state of affairs is laid out:

Wealthy countries subsidize their commercial fishermen to the tune of about $30 billion a year. Their goal is to keep their fishermen on the water. China, for example, provides $2 billion a year in fuel subsidies; the European Union and its member nations provide more than $7 billion of subsidies a year. Such policies boost the number of working boats, increase the global catch, and drive down fish prices. That makes it more difficult for fishermen in poor nations like Mauritania, who get no subsidies, to compete.

The end result: African waters are losing fish stock rapidly, with ramifications both to the economies of Africa's coastal nations and to the world's ocean ecology. Over the past three decades, the amount of fish in West African waters has declined by up to 50 percent, according to Daniel Pauly, a researcher at the University of British Columbia.

Thanks in part to that ‘green’ fuel, corn-based ethanol

U.S. farmers planted 92.9 million acres of corn this spring, a 15 percent-plus jump from last year. If you lumped all that land together — not too hard to imagine, given that corn ag is highly concentrated in the Midwest — you’d have a monocropped land mass nearly equal in size to the state of […]

Overfishing, pollution contribute to exponential rise

Oceana divers documenting the state of ecological communities in Cabrera Marine Park along the Mediterranean Coast encountered swarms of jellyfish, with numbers in the thousands, 30 miles south of the area.

On a seamount some 130 meters from the surface, Oceana's unmanned submarine robot revealed especially high concentrations of these jellies that have wreaked havoc along the Mediterranean in years past. Oceana is working to have the area added to the national park.

High concentrations of jellyfish are not a local problem. The same factors that allow jellyfish to "overflourish" in many parts of the world are at play here: Essentially humans are creating a jellyfish wonderland by overfishing and polluting our oceans.

The LA Times reports on global warming and skinny whales

Kenneth Weiss, a surfer/reporter who last year headed the team that won a Pulitzer for the Los Angeles Times for a series on our trashed oceans, returns to the front page today with a story about how global warming appears to be damaging the arctic feeding grounds of the gray whale, leading to "skinny whales" and unusual behaviors.

The whales are journeying far to the north of their usual territory looking for the sea-bed crustaceans that make up the bulk of their diet -- and foraging off California and along the western coast as well.

The story tops the front page of the print edition, but for some reason is buried in the California/local edition online. Nonetheless, it's worth a look, for the graphs, maps, and photographs, as well as the text. Here's the bottom line:

Latest victory protects Pacific sea turtles

Endangered leatherback sea turtles migrating from an Indonesian beach to feed on jellyfish off the Pacific coast have one less obstacle to overcome.

NOAA has denied issuance of the special exempted fishing permit required for gillnet boats to operate in an area of coast stretching from central California to central Oregon, during the time critically endangered leatherback sea turtles are feeding there.

Illegal, but they’ll do it anyway

According to the Vancouver Sun, Planktos is planning to continue its scheme to dump iron into the oceans off the Galapagos, even though the EPA has ruled it illegal. The EPA ruled in May that it needs a permit. Planktos CEO Russ George has a simple solution: hire a foreign vessel and fly a flag of convenience.

Ken Caldeira and Chris Field of the Carnegie Institute say that it is impossible to verify whether carbon is sequestrated, and that if it is, the added carbon will contribute to ocean acidification. Via ECT it turns out that as of June 19 Planktos still claims on its website to be using nano-particles of iron rather than regular iron dust. (It is pretty far down, so I suggest you use your browser's page search function.) Planktos has said publicly that they are not using nano-particles. Maybe they are just leaving the term on their website because it sounds cool -- which would not speak well for their integrity. Or maybe after taking major-league public hits they still have not gotten around to correcting their website -- which would not speak well for their competence. Or maybe they actually are planning to dump nano-particles of iron into the ocean, which would not speak well for their sanity.

At any rate, Jim Thomas of ETC has suggested to me that when they select their flag of convenience, they consider flying the skull and crossbones.

North Pacific Fishery Management Council protects seafloor habitat areas in Bering Sea

It's official -- and unanimous. The North Pacific Fishery Management Council voted to ban bottom trawling of some 180,000 square miles of previously unexploited ocean floor in the Bering Sea, particularly in the North.

The area is home to 26 species of marine mammals, including whales and walruses, as well as 450 species of fish and million of seabirds that flock to the region from all seven continents.

Oceana board member featured as quiz show category

Answer: He once played the role of a former Red Sox pitcher-turned bartender, now he plays the part of ocean crusader as a member of Oceana's Board of Directors.

Who is Ted Danson?

The actor, who's advocated for ocean conservation for nearly 20 years, has appeared in everything from Saving Private Ryan to HBO's "Curb Your Enthusiasm." Most recently he appeared as one of the categories on the television quiz show Jeopardy!

Acting and advocacy -- that's what we call a true daily double.