Fish Food 4 Thought

     As we've already established, the salmon farming industry is no sustainable alternative to industrial fishing. Aside from the counterintuitive use of wild fish to make feed for these domestic fish, the cramped cages breed diseases that infect native runs, the accidental capture of wild salmon has been documented, the exorbitant pollution of the sea floor is beyond dispute, the escape of Atlantic salmon into Pacific waters creates invasive species, marine mammals and seabirds that try to eat from the farms are shot and killed, and the farms are often placed in the territorial waters of indigenous peoples who don't want them there. This decline in salmon kills coastal forests and starves endangered populations of sea lions and orcas.       Alaska, Oregon, and California long ago banned these toxic offshore salmon farms, and the populations of salmon as well as the ecosystems they support are now recovering. In the past few years, this progress has s...

     The G7 nations (sometimes called G8, when the rest of the European Union is included) of the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, France, Italy, and Japan, are the most powerful economic players in the world, their economies alone accounting for more than half of the global total.      It is about time that conservation be a primary consideration of economies, and, in one respect, we are seeing some progress. In 2019, Canada became the first G7 country to ban the trade in shark fins. (Shark finning is already illegal in the waters of these nations.) Earlier this year, I reported on a bill working its way through Congress that would, among other things, ban the shark fin trade in the United States. While this bill crawls toward passage, the U.K. beat the United States to it and became the second nation to ban the shark fin trade.      Announced today, the ban is the most strict in the world, forbidding the import, export, ...

       Sea Shepherd began Operation Sola Stella in February 2017, their second campaign to stop illegal fishing in Africa with their third African government. In the first 20 days, three vessels were arrested on dozens of violations, including using undocumented crew, keeping crew in appalling conditions, trying to bribe Coast Guard inspectors, fishing in areas reserved for artisanal fisheries, and underreporting their catch. The next month, they arrested the Star Shrimper XXV  for fishing without a license; the "certified sustainable" vessel was also arrested for not using a TED (Turtle Exclusion Device), which are required to prevent endangered sea turtles from dying in shrimpers. The vessel spent two months in detention and received a massive fine before being recalled to its home state of Nigeria. The entire crew was suspended and the officers were fired, and it spent another several months in detention there; this arrest put the Star Shrimper XXV out of com...