Sea Notes

Finding Bluefin Nurseries (and What It Means)

New confirmation today that Atlantic bluefin tunas get together on their feeding grounds but are born in nursery areas on opposite sides of the ocean. And a new chance for you to take action to protect these threatened fishes.

In an article published today in Science, researchers used the chemical composition of otoliths -- the bones in the ears of tunas -- to identify precisely where young fish spent the first year of their life. Turns out there are distinct nurseries in the Gulf of Mexico and the Eastern Mediterranean to which parent fish return to give birth.

This is further confirmation of data gathered  in more than a decade of field tagging of adult tunas by Dr. Barbara Block and other scientists at the Tuna Research and Conservation Center, a collaboration between the Monterey Bay Aquarium and Stanford University.

And it lends new urgency to calls for better management of these critical habitats -- and better protection of tunas while they're in those waters.

Action is happening on two fronts. First, the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas meets next month in Morocco to discuss declining tuna stocks and ways to better manage species.  To date, the commission has failed to incorporate the new scientific findings into its management practices as it presides over the collapse of bluefin tuna populations in the North Atlantic and Mediterranean. (Remember what happened to North Atlantic cod?)

Second, the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) proposes that bluefin spawning grounds and juvenile bluefin feeding groups be given additional protection in the Gulf of Mexico and along the Atlantic coast. It is taking public comment on policies that would define "essential fish habitat" for bluefins and other highly migratory Atlantic species, including several kinds of sharks and other tunas.

It recommends that key waters be designated as a federal "Habitat Area of Particular Concern" (HAPC) that would "highlight the importance of the area for bluefin tuna spawning and provide added conservation benefits."

The aquarium, and other ocean conservation organizations, called three years ago for just such a designation in the Gulf of Mexico. It could happen now -- with your help. Through November 18, you can weigh in with comments on the NMFS proposal. Here's how.

From Protectors to Pirates

This has to be one of the most bizarre of all the unintended consequences of global overfishing:

Efforts by fishermen in Somalia to protect their tuna-rich waters from plundering by multinational fleets have created a flotilla of pirates who grabbed global headlines this week when they seized a cargo ship carrying more than they bargained for -- a freighter filled with tanks, grenades and other armaments.

According to Jeffrey Gettleman, writing in the New York Times, "The piracy industry started about 10 to 15 years ago, Somali officials said, as a response to illegal fishing (my emphasis). Somalia’s central government imploded in 1991, casting the country into chaos. With no patrols along the shoreline, Somalia’s tuna-rich waters were soon plundered by commercial fishing fleets from around the world. Somali fishermen armed themselves and turned into vigilantes by confronting illegal fishing boats and demanding that they pay a tax.

"'From there, they got greedy,' said Mohamed Osman Aden, a Somali diplomat in Kenya. 'They starting attacking everyone.'"

It's not easy being a tuna these days -- not in the Mediterranean or most other places, for that matter. Steve Palumbi's microdocumentary, Tuna and the Can, makes that abundantly clear.

But it's not so great to be a human whose relies on tuna fishing for food and a livelihood. If we don't get a handle on how we manage tuna fisheries, creating a generation of pirates in Somalia may be the least of our troubles.

If You Knew Sushi...

Great news for sushi lovers. Three leading ocean conservation organizations -- the Seafood Watch program here at Monterey Bay Aquarium, as well as Blue Ocean Institute and Environmental Defense Fund -- will release consumer guides for choosing sustainable sushi on October 22.

While the consumer guides –- in print, online and mobile device versions -– differ in appearance, all are based on similar data, and offer one consistent message: Our sushi choices have an impact on the future of the ocean.

"The reality is quite simple," says Sheila Bowman, outreach manager for Seafood Watch. "If you care about the future of the oceans, you'll avoid red-listed sushi."

For sushi aficionados, that means both pleasant surprises, and some disappointments. The "red" list includes items like bluefin tuna (hon maguro/kuro maguro) and freshwater eel (unagi), along with farmed salmon (sake). These species are either overfished, farmed with aquaculture methods that pollute the ocean, or caught using methods that destroy ocean habitats or kill large amounts of other sea life.

Green-listed "Best Choices" include wild-caught Alaska salmon (sake), farmed scallops (hotate) and Pacific halibut (hirame), in part because they come from abundant, well-managed fisheries or -– in the case of scallops -– are raised using sustainable aquaculture methods.

Pocket guides will be available on our Seafood Watch website on October 22 -- a day when we hope you'll take part in a Sustainable Sushi Party at home or your local sushi restaurant. The good news is that every sushi restaurant offers some sustainable items.

(If you live in the San Francisco Bay Area, check out Tataki, currently the only 100% sustainable sushi restaurant we've found in North America. Casson Trenor, one of the folks behind Tataki, will publish a book about sustainable sushi in January 2009.)

In addition to our new Sushi Pocket Guide, we'll have other fun items for sustainable sushi advocates. I'll have more details in the next two weeks.

A Future for Fish (and Birds)

Two good pieces of news coming out this week and last -- and both involve positive developments for ocean wildlife as a result of new approaches to commercial fishing.

First, the United Nations' Food & Agriculture Organization reports a dramatic decline in the number of albatross killed by longline fishing crews in Chile as a result of new methods adopted to protect the endangered seabirds. FAO fisheries experts are calling for wider adoption of the new methods by industrial fishing fleets worldwide.

It's another step in a direction that many fishing nations are already taking. And, as in Chile, there's a huge payoff for albatross worldwide -- including Laysan albatross like Makana, a rescued bird, pictured here, who resides at the aquarium.

On the fisheries management front, economists and ecologists published a study in the journal Science documenting that when fishing crews or cooperatives are given exclusive rights to a share of the catch from a fishery they are less likely to overfish.

Instead of a race to catch as many fish as possible, with no thoughts for what happens in future years, there's an economic incentive to sustain the fishery for the long term.

The keys to success in the 121 fisheries the researchers studied? Realistic quotas for the entire fishery along with individual "catch shares" that divvy up the quota.

It's a beautiful illustraion of how to reverse the "tragedy of the commons" -- one embraced by commercial fishermen.

Sounds like cause for hope.

(Of course, you can do your part by carrying and using a Seafood Watch pocket guide, or accessing the latest information with your mobile device at SeafoodWatch.org.)

An Award for Seafood Watch

Big day here at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Bon Appétit Magazine announced it's honoring us as its "Tastemaker of the Year" today, recognizing our Seafood Watch program for bringing the sustainable seafood message to a national audience.

Julie Packard, our executive director, will accept the award at the 11th Bon Appétit Awards ceremonies in New York City on September 12.

It's great to get recognition from one of the top culinary magazines in the United States. It's even better to see the way the public (and businesses) have embraced the idea that they can -- through their seafood choices -- make a difference for the health of the oceans.

It's a far cry from the way things were when we launched the program in 1999. The seafood industry was dismissive and market forces were perpetuating a decline in ocean wildlife populations across the globe.

Now, 24 million pocket guides later, we're partnering with restaurants and big food service companies that are eager to change their way of doing business.

As with sustainable and organic foods from land, folks are embracing the notion that we have a responsibility to protect the environment through our food choices.

If you haven't picked up your Seafood Watch pocket guide yet, they're easy to find online. You can also access our seafood recommendations via your mobile device.

And when you visit our website, you can sign up as a Seafood Watch Advocate -- helping spread the word in your community and circle of friends.

It's a great wave to ride.

Sustainable Seafood Marches Forward

Great blog today by Deirdre Donovan in Zagat Buzz Los Angeles about the commitments chefs are making to source (and serve) sustainable seafood.

Looks like it was prompted by a survey Zagat conducted in which 54 percent of respondents said they “try to order sustainable seafood but can’t always keep track of what they are supposed to order.”

She cites programs like the Seafood Watch initiative here at Monterey Bay Aquarium, and similar efforts like Shedd Aquarium's Right Bite, New England Aquarium's Celebrate Seafood and the Blue Ocean Institute seafood program (among others) as ways consumers & chefs are getting good information to make better seafood choices.

She also recognizes chefs who are leading the way, including the amazing Ted and Cindy Walter of Passionfish, right next door to us in Pacific Grove, California.

Put this together with the fact that more food service providers are buying local and organic -- including the Kaiser Permanente health center in Oakland, California with public service announcements about food miles on Bay Area radio, its own on-site farmers market and a food blog on its website -- and you can feel the momentum growing.

That's all good news for the future of the oceans.

Two Tales of Bluefin Tuna

Following up on yesterday's post about the fishermen's strike in Japan:

Russ Parsons of the L.A. Times blogs about how strikes and high fuel costs are affecting the availability of tuna and other fresh seafood in the U.S. He also quotes Jesse Marsh of our Seafood Watch fisheries research team on the possible long-term impacts if fuel prices remain high.

Our Stanford University colleagues in Barbara Block's research lab are also blogging, this time about their success in placing electronic data tags on Pacific bluefin tuna during last week's expedition out of San Diego. They put 112 new tags on bluefin, for a total of nearly 550 tagged bluefin in the Pacific since their Tag-A-Giant program began. (Monterey Bay Aquarium partners with Stanford on the program.)

As data come back documenting the migrations of these Pacific fish, we'll begin to get a better picture about their migrations across the ocean. Similar work by the Block lab in the Atlantic has resulted in more than 1,000 tags on giant bluefin over the past decade -- and a comprehensive picture of their travels through the Western Atlantic, the  North Atlantic, Mediterranean and Caribbean.

There's data enough to support a dramatic reduction in fisheries quotas -- if the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas can muster the political will to impose it. Sadly, the commission seems unable to do more than preside over a collapse more dramatic than the 90 percent decline it's already suffered.

Calls for a moratorium on bluefin tuna fishing in the Atlantic were ignored last year. Since then, the European fishery was closed early and European chefs have begun to boycott bluefin tuna. ICCAT has another chance this November. We'll be watching.

Fish, Fuel & the Future

The skyrocketing price of oil is having unintended consequences on the high seas.

From Europe to Asia, fishing fleets are staying in port and fishermen are rising in protest at the staggering cost they have to pay to fuel up their boats if they want to go fishing.

Right now it's a short-term crisis. But if oil remains expensive, the economics of fishing could well undergo a sea change.

And the results -- which are going to be painful for fishing families and the fishing industry -- could have some benefits for ocean wildlife.

There's general agreement that there are too many fishing boats in the world, many underwritten by huge subsidies from national governments, chasing too few fish.

Will those fleets shrink in size in the face of expensive fuel? Will that mean fewer hooks and nets chasing the fish? And will that, in turn, give resilient fish populations " target="_blank">a chance to rebound from the overfishing that has led scientists to warn that global fisheries could collapse by 2048 if we don't change our ways?

Time will tell.

If nothing else, some fishermen may do what U.S. shrimpers are doing: using biodiesel fuel and going green as a way to set themselves apart in the eyes of consumers who are looking for more ocean-friendly approaches to commercial fishing.

(Wild-caught U.S. shrimp is a Good Alternative of the Seafood Watch program at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Check our other recommendations for ways to select seafood and preserve healthy ocean ecosystems.)

The Perils of Penguins

Penguins have had a good run in the popular media over the past few years, from March of the Penguins to Madagascar to Happy Feet.

Outside of movie theaters, the story's not as great. Penguins in temperate regions already faced a are in decline because of a quadruple whammy:  mining of guano, egg harvesting, commercial fishing and oil spills.

Now comes a new study indicating that climate change is adding new stresses, as penguins are forced to swim farther from shore to find food. The loss of sea ice and icebergs means fewer places where their prey species can aggregate.

No polar bears in the Southern Ocean, no penguins in the Arctic, but these ice-dependent creatures face similar threats.

Dee Boersma of the University of Washington spells out the details in a paper just published in Bioscience.

There's a lot we can do as individuals to reduce our carbon footprint. And we can take ownership of the overfishing issue by using a Seafood Watch pocket guide when buying seafood, or becoming a Seafood Watch Advocate and encouraging businesses to change their seafood buying practices.

It won't happen overnight, but our incremental changes will make a different -- for polar bears and penguins.

An Ich-y Situation

Just when you thought the state of Pacific salmon in 2008 couldn't get any worse, come two more pieces of bad news: one environmental, one political.

First, Ken Weiss, the Pulitzer Prize-winning oceans writer for the Los Angeles Times, reports that Alaska salmon -- up til now in such good shape that they're certified by the Marine Stewardship Council as sustainable and a Best Choice of our Seafood Watch program -- may be in trouble because of global warming.

The rivers in which they spawn are warming. Warmer water is more hospitable to diseases and parasites, including "white spot disease" from a parasite called ich for short (pronounced "ick") that renders Yukon River salmon unfit for anything but sled dogs or the garbage.

That's an environmental wake-up call.

On the political front, U.S. senators and members of Congress from the West Coast are fuming because the Bush Administration is proposing to cut $70 million from the $180 million disaster appropriation to aid the salmon fleet idled by the cancellation of this year's salmon season because of the California salmon population.

The money would be redirected to help pay for the 2010 federal census.

In a letter to the President, the bipartisan coalition asserts:

“This proposal is especially egregious when you consider that your administration’s water policies on all of the Pacific Northwest’s major salmon rivers are the reason this disaster funding is needed in the first place.”

And that was their reaction BEFORE he proposed reopening U.S. waters to offshore oil and gas development.