EDFish

Another Good Summer for Kemp’s Ridley Sea Turtles

Kemp's Ridley tracks on a beach in Mexico

Tracks from Kemp’s ridley sea turtles can be seen on a stretch of beach near Rancho Nuevo, Mexico earlier this year. Photo courtesy of LightHawk.

Kemp’s ridley sea turtle nesting season is winding down for the summer, and I’m happy to report that nest numbers are still on the rise!  While the Kemp’s ridleys still are the world’s most critically endangered sea turtle, they are making a huge come back in recent years.

Until half a century ago, tens of thousands of Kemp’s ridleys would surge onto Mexico’s Gulf of Mexico beaches in a few large nesting events each year to lay their eggs. At the turn of the 20th century, turtle meat and eggs became popular delicacies, causing the turtle’s population to crash.  Later, accidental catches in fishing gear kept their population from recovering.

Today, Kemp’s ridleys are rebounding due to protections that government, fishing industry, EDF and other conservation groups helped win.  These unprecedented actions included protecting Mexico beaches where the turtles nest, monitoring hatchlings at an incubation site, and establishing the headstart program and a second nesting site in Texas.  The initial recovery program spanned from 1978-1988.  During this time, over 22,000 eggs were transported from Playa de Rancho Nuevo in Mexico to Padre Island National Seashore in Texas.  Once hatched, the turtles were exposed to the Padre Island sand and surf, and then captured and transported to the National Marine Fisheries Service Laboratory in Galveston, Texas, where they were reared in captivity for 9-11 months. This “head-start” program allowed the turtles to grow large enough to be tagged for future recognition and to avoid most natural predators.    It was hoped that this exposure would imprint the turtles to the National Seashore so they would return year after year to nest at adulthood. Read More »

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Marine Resources Economics Grants Award to Authors of Study on Bering Sea Crab Fishery Catch Shares

 

Seabrooke-Discovery

The Seabrooke. Photo credit: Discovery Channel

Marine Resource Economics announced Joshua K. Abbott Brian Garber-Yonts, and James E. Wilen as recipients of the 2010 Dr. S.-Y. Hong Award for Outstanding Article. The peer-reviewed article, Employment and Remuneration Effects of IFQs in the Bering Sea/Aleutian Islands Crab Fisheries found that the majority of working crews in the Bering Sea red king crab and snow crab fisheries benefited in the first three years of catch share implementation.

Abbott, an Assistant Professor of Environmental and Resource Economics in Arizona State University’s School of Sustainability, wrote an EDFish blog post on the study in 2010. According to the study, crab fishing in the Bering Sea/Aleutian Islands became more productive following catch share implementation. Crab fishing also became more lucrative for crews – seasons lengthened, employment in crew hours and daily crew pay remained stable, and seasonal crew pay increased substantially. Read More »

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New Ocean Health Index Puts Focus on Fisheries

To manage anything well, you’ve got to measure it.  And you’ve got to make sure you are measuring the right things.  The new Ocean Health Index puts us on a path toward both of these goals.

The fact that the ocean scores only 60 out of 100 on the Ocean Health Index is good to know – it means that we humans are not doing a very good job in ensuring that the ocean provides the many benefits that it is capable of providing.  It’s a little like finding out that your car is only producing 60% of its maximum power output, or that your garden is producing only 60% of the tomatoes that it could be producing.  You know that something is not right.

When you break the overall score down, it’s clear that we are doing a particularly bad job getting food out of the ocean (score = 24 out of 100).  Although overall seafood production is up, most of it now comes from farms that feed fish that we don’t eat a lot of (so – called forage fish like sardines and anchovies) to fish that we like to eat (like salmon and shrimp).  The problem is that the process of farming converts large amounts of forage fish into much smaller amounts of salmon and shrimp.  And the less forage fish we leave in the ocean, the less food there is for dolphins, albatrosses, sharks and the other wildlife that grace the ocean and enrich our existence.

The other way that we are getting it wrong on seafood production is that a lot of fisheries are not producing nearly as much as they could be, ironically because we’ve taken too much, too fast.  Fisheries are renewable resources, but in order to produce good yields over many years, it’s critically important to leave enough fish in the water to produce the next generation.  Of the 30% of the world’s fisheries that have been assessed, it’s clear that we have been taking too much- resulting in high yields initially but low yields subsequently. Read More »

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In-Depth Reporting on the Dangers of Commercial Fishing

US Commercial Fishing Fatalities By Region 2000-2009, 504 total

Source: Jennifer Lincoln, NIOSH

The Center for Public Integrity teamed up with NPR and WBUR to report on the significant dangers of the commercial fishing industry. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics has found that commercial fishing is the deadliest job in America.In 2010, fishermen faced a risk of dying on the job 42 times higher than the average worker.

The in-depth piece by the Center for Public Integrity’s Ronnie Greene highlights a host of reasons why fishing can be such risky business. In many ways fishing is inherently dangerous. One fisherman interviewed explained if there’s a problem on the boat at sea you can’t exactly pull over and call AAA. Read More »

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NOAA Cites West Coast Trawl Fishery Improvements

Winona J Docked in Newport, Oregon

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Northwest regional administrator William Stelle had an op-ed in the Portland Oregonian on Saturday that discussed progress in the West Coast groundfish catch share program during its first year of implementation.

The op-ed, Managing the Pacific fishery: Catch share system recasts commercial fishing, discusses how the fishery was managed and carried out prior to 2011. “Fishermen would fish hard, regardless of weather or market conditions, resulting in safety issues and a boom-and-bust supply of fish,” Stelle wrote. “The result: shorter seasons, potentially unsafe conditions, high levels of bycatch and sharply limited marketing opportunities, which depressed prices, profits and wages.”

Under the new program, landings stayed strong; revenues shot up to $54 million for the fleet in 2011, versus an annual average of $38 million over the previous five years; and discards in the non-whiting groundfish fleet plummeted from 17% in 2010 to less than 5% in 2011.

To read the full op-ed click here. 

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Stop and Watch the Dolphins

We can often get wrapped up in policy discussions and advocacy, and forget to take a moment to appreciate why we care about the ocean.  Last week a video started popping up on the internet of some dolphins off the coast of Santa Cruz, CA.

The video was meant to be of a tuna fishing trip, but caught some magical footage of a pod of dolphins swimming together.  The video is so vivid; it almost looks like computer generated animation.  So take a moment, click play (wait until about the one minute mark), and appreciate why working to preserve our oceans’ ecosystems is important.

 

The Blue from Mark Peters on Vimeo.

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