Fish Food 4 Thought

     24,000 fisheries workers die every year on the job, making it among the most dangerous industries in the world. Hundreds of fisheries observers, mostly in developing nations, have gone overboard, and not by accident. Try telling the truth on whether or not fishermen are breaking the law when you are alone and outnumbered in hostile waters. Fishing vessels carry illegal weapons, transport illegal immigrants (being responsible for a large percentage of those who enter the United States, for instance), and mule illegal drugs about Latin America and Southeast Asia. These are the beginning of a long list of atrocities; it's not just the fishermen in Thailand that are subjected to a form of modern slavery nearly as large as that of sex trafficking; Asian vessels that operate in Hawaii dock in Honolulu and make sure their fishermen never leave the ship to describe the horrors they have endured. All of this is overseen by European and Asian captains and officers who make decent pay an

     The Blackfish Effect was not a coincidence; it was and continues to be a proven result of the dramatic and shocking documentary Blackfish , released in 2013. It exposed the disgusting cruelty shown toward orcas held captive at SeaWorld as well as the maddening effect that led Tilikum to kill three people (no wild orca has been recorded killing a single person). This resulted in dozens of nations moving to ban or restrict marine mammal captivity while SeaWorld has seen a continual decline in attendance and overall revenue that has forced them to lay off thousands of employees. SeaWorld tried to take legal action against the film for a decade, and they have lost every time.      Such has been the case with Ali Tabrizi's documentary Seaspiracy . Even before the film was released, leaked documents revealed insiders from the fishing and aquaculture industries formulated a legal and PR strategy to control the damage that might be caused. They slammed it as "false" without

     We call sharks monsters, represented best by the movie Jaws  for their serial predation of innocent people. There is a slight error in this logic in that it is not only completely false, but that the opposite is true. Sharks kill, on average between five and 10 people a year: you are more likely to be struck by lightning playing golf or hit by a soda machine walking down the street than killed by being bitten by a shark. I say "bitten" because sharks do not eat people: their teeth are more like needles than knives, and all shark-related deaths are caused by blood loss and lack of available medical treatment, usually from a single bite.      Compare that to how humans treat sharks. Shark finning is the most common threat we pose to the animals. Sharks are caught on lines and dragged onto the deck of a fishing boat, where they have their fins sliced off while they are still alive. The shark, still suffering from the removal of its fins, is thrown overboard, where the 98 pe

     Since 2020, StopFinning EU has worked as a collaboration between numerous organizations to secure a comprehensive ban on the trade of shark fins in the European Union, a collective of 27 nations that comprises 22 percent of the global economy. Their citizens' initiative has gathered 230,000 votes, but it needs a million to be brought before the European Union Parliament. If you are a European resident, please vote here .      Now, we have an opportunity to make this momentum go global. The African Union is a powerhouse of the world's economic growth as well as a hub for global biodiversity, including in the oceans. Shark finning and shark fishing are still legal in most African waters and the shark fin trade remains entirely legal on the continent. With the United States, Canada, China, and other nations working to abolish this barbaric trade, which kills 100 million sharks a year, the African Union can do the same. The body has a unique opportunity as it seeks to build a

     The idea that farmed salmon is a healthy, sustainable, ethical alternative to wild-caught salmon is the greatest marketing fraud that has ever been perpetuated in modern society. Salmon farming is relatively new, originating in Norway in the 1960s, but aquaculture stems back thousands of years. All sorts of species are farmed, from shrimp to tilapia, and much of it is harmful to the environment. However, this article will take a look at salmon farming in particular.      There are seven species of salmon: the Atlantic salmon and six species in the Pacific, including coho and chinook. All have a dirty gray flesh, so dye is used to color the salmon pink. Spending their entire lives in the ocean, the fish are laden with toxins and heavy metals like PCBs, mercury, and even plastic, a situation that only gets worse as the oceans become more polluted.      Rather than helping wild salmon and their habitat, salmon farming is actually far worse. Atlantic salmon are the salmon of choice fo

     The ocean is water. Water is life. The oceans are life, more literally than most people realize. The ocean is the water that makes up 70 percent of human cells and, therefore, 70 percent of the human body. The ocean is the moisture in the air that is a predominant force in weather and climate. The ocean is the iceberg and the currents that regulate this, as well as the estuaries and seas packed with life we often associate with the term ocean. As Captain Paul Watson says, Earth is the Planet Ocean. The seas link and have always linked people, not divided them.      The oceans are under attack from anthropocentric greed driving a short-sighted desire for material gain today at the expense of any prospects for a livable tomorrow. It is estimated that 8 million tons of marine debris flows from rivers and is dumped off of boats every year, washing up on beaches and strangling the very ecosystems that make up most of the planet. Half of this is fishing gear, making it the single-larges

       The movement to save the whales was and is one of the most effective in conservation history. Perú, Chile, Australia, Spain, and South Africa, now among the most vocal defenders of whales, hunted them as recently as the late 1970s and early 1980s. More than 3 million whales were killed in the 20th century; even if the current rate held steady for the rest of the century, 150,000 would be killed in the 21st century, meaning that 95 percent of the industry has disappeared since 1970.       Japan once slaughtered nearly 1,500 whales a year: their quota is now only 383. Norway is now the largest killer of whales each year: although they have a quota for nearly 1,300, they take less than half of that number each year. Their fleet of 60 ships now numbers less than a dozen. Iceland last hunted whales in 2018, and the COVID-19 pandemic is likely to strike the final blow for an industry owned by only one old man facing investigation for corrupt business practices. Whaling has entirely en