Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Add it up, and it’s hard not to conclude that, as Karen Pinchin puts it in her riveting debut book, “Kings of Their Own Ocean: Tuna, Obsession, and the Future of Our Seas,” fisheries science is “an impossible, thankless job with no easy answers.”
The aquaculture industry just got a huge boost from the Trump administration, as an executive order just paved the way for these companies to build massive industrial fish farms in the oceans.
Is there any difference between the accidental but inevitable mass killing of dolphins by the fishing industry, and the deliberate annual massacre in Japan, that rightly causes such public outrage? If something is morally wrong, no amount of money can make it morally right. The slaughter of dolphins and other magnificent wildlife is, on any measure, morally wrong.
If you agree, there’s a simple answer. Stop buying fish.
As a travel tale the book is first-rate. But Weymouth’s keen interest in the Chinook – aka King – Salmon, and his listening skills when he meets dozens of river-dwellers whose cultures have been shaped by the migrations of this fish, combine to fascinating, awe-inspiring, and often heart-breaking effect.
Composed of the six countries that drove out the Premier, along with Madagascar and Somalia, FISH-i Africa seeks to form a united front against illegal — or “pirate” — fishing.
The sea has been nearly emptied of fish, and that has generated a booming jellyfish population and of other invertebrates, such as crabs and lobsters whose numbers, once were kept in check by the fish.
The collapse of the North Atlantic cod fishery industry gives us a good example of the abrupt collapse in the production of resources – even resources which are theoretically renewable.
The escalating pursuit of fish—now with gross revenue exceeding $80 billion per year—has had heavy ecological consequences, including the alteration of marine food webs via a massive reduction in the populations of larger, longer-lived predatory fish such as tunas, cods, and marlins. Unselective fishing gear, including longlines and bottom-scraping trawls, kill large numbers of non-target animals like sea turtles, sharks, and corals.
