Fish Food 4 Thought

     On the night of September 12th, 2021, 1,428 Atlantic white-sided dolphins were killed in an unauthorized hunt in the Faroe Islands. On that bloody Sunday, the entire pod, including mothers and calves, were driven to the shore with boats, some of the creatures displaying evidence of having their flukes shredded by the propellers, before all the animals had their spines severed with a lance and their heads taken off with sharp knives. It is the cruelest dolphin slaughter on the planet: this particular hunt dragged on for well over six hours, some creatures beached in shallow waters that grew increasingly red with the blood of their family members, 1,428 cries of agony that were silenced. This hunt was the largest single recorded slaughter of whales or dolphins in the history of humanity, the largest dolphin hunt in the Faroe Islands, and the only one that recorded 1,000 or more deaths in the past 80 years. The murder brought the total number of dolphins killed in 2021 ...

     International waters make up 70 percent of the planet's oceans, or roughly half of the planet's surface. Owned by nobody and subject to no authority, they are lawless, and they also make the perfect marine reserve. While most fishing does not occur in international waters, that it what makes it perfect for designation as a marine reserve in which all commercial activity is banned. Every nation on Earth coming together to protect half the planet by 2050 would be a huge victory and might just show humanity how truly inconsequential it should be on the face of the Earth.      So, what of the 30 percent of oceans owned by nations? There is currently a goal of protecting 30 percent of the oceans by 2030, and that is an admirable goal. With all this talk of 2050 being when climate change destroys the world and the ocean has more plastic than fish, let's make 2050 the year by which half of all oceans owned by nations are protected in marine reserves.   ...

     In 2021, Sea Shepherd conducted a successful campaign to combat illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing in the Eastern Tropical Pacific. This so-called "IUU" fishing comprises 15 to 40 percent of all fishing activity on Earth. In their first partnership with the nation of Perú, Sea Shepherd, using its vessel Ocean Warrior , arrested six ships for IUU fishing in a matter of just a few weeks.      An even more consequential part of this campaign was exposing the massive Chinese fleet just outside the Galápagos Marine Reserve. Sea Shepherd documented vessels with histories of labor abuses using crew that had not set foot on land or heard any news from the outside world in nearly two years, with one Chinese fisherman even asking if the COVID-19 pandemic, which had been in the United States for nearly 18 months and killed hundreds of thousands of people at that point, had made it to the United States yet. These vessels flipped off their AIS information...

     2022 is already shaping up to be a historic year for shark conservation. 2021 was an important year, for sure: nations pledged to protect the majority of the most important shark habitat on Earth, and the U.K. joined Canada in banning the shark fin trade. However, 2022 has started off with a bang.      At the beginning of the year, 450,000 people had signed onto the European Citizens' Initiative urging the European Union to ban the shark fin trade. The European Union is relatively behind on shark conservation. They did ban the practice of shark finning in 2013 (13 years after the United States), but they have yet to ban the trade in shark fins.      There's a persistent myth that China is the sole destination for shark fins in the world, and for a long time, that was mostly true. However, China banned the consumption of shark fin soup, a tasteless chicken- or fish-broth-based soup used to display one's wealth, at public functions years a...

     Definitions of what constitutes the Eastern Tropical Pacific vary widely. In some minds, including that of the author, the area can best be defined as the millions of square kilometers of ocean from the most northerly shores of Baja California to the colder coasts of Southern Peru. However, what everyone can agree on is an area called the Eastern Tropical Pacific (or ETP) Seascape, an area covering 770,000 square kilometers.       Covering virtually the entirety of the waters of Colombia, Ecuador, Costa Rica, and Panama, this area is one of the most biodiverse regions on Earth. It is the single most important shark migration route on the face of the planet, home to such sights as schooling hammerheads. It is also home to dozens of species of rays, endangered marine mammals, and some of the most threatened sea turtle populations anywhere in the seas.      Protecting the Eastern Tropical Pacific has been a high priority for marine con...

       In 2016, Sea Shepherd launched Operation Albacore , a partnership with Gabon to weed out illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing in their waters. Coming toward the end of Sea Shepherd's anti-whaling campaigns in the Antarctic (which saved 6,000 whales and ultimately saw Japan leave Antarctica in 2019), it was met with skepticism by the group's supporters. However, with a few possible exceptions, this is the most impactful campaign Sea Shepherd has ever conducted and comes at a time when Gabon is ramping up their work defending their marine life.      In 2017, Gabon's president announced the creation of a combined total of 20 new marine parks and aquatic reserves covering 26 percent of Gabon's oceans, surpassing the network of protected areas that covers 10 percent of Gabon's land area and making it the largest network of marine protected areas in Africa. In 2018, Gabon banned the practice of setting tuna nets on whales and whale shark...

       It's been a decade since the plight of the oceans was first brought to my attention. I've always cared for animals and the environment, but the oceans called to someone who grew up in Wisconsin, about as far away from the ocean as one can be. Carl Safina's work studying seabirds and sea turtles, describing their beauty and the threats they face, inspired me, as did his work decades ago to restore America's fisheries.      However, it was Sea Shepherd's direct-action approach that appealed to me, and the atrocities and corruption they exposed that angered me. One that stuck out in my mind was their campaign Operation Blue Rage, which occurred in 2010 and 2011. In the first year, they were able to free 800 endangered bluefin tuna off the coast of Libya in spite of being attacked with hooks and rocks. In the second year, they discovered an even larger operation with nearly a dozen vessels working together to illegally catch thousands of tuna. Inste...

     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...

       It absolutely irks me when people say that sea turtle egg poachers are just poor folks trying to feed their families for two reasons: A) poverty is not an excuse for humans to drive species to extinction; money is expendable but life is not, and B) it is simply not true. Especially in Latin America, where most sea turtle egg poaching takes place, the wildlife trade is directly linked to the violent cartels and other criminal syndicates who are not poor and are impossible to defend. Those who profit off of sea turtles eggs profit off of not just shark fins, but also cocaine, weapons, and sometimes even human beings, and in too many countries in the region the people who are supposed to enforce the law are bought off by these criminals.      Even with the horrible impact of sea turtle egg poaching, this alone is not what is driving them to extinction, nor is the legal (albeit barbaric and wrong) hunting taking place in countries like Australia, Fi...

     Sea lions are the constant companions of vessels in harbors and coastal areas across the West Coast of the United States. They are gentle creatures, more bark than bite, with complex social systems. They are mothers and fathers like you and I, feeding their youth with milk to foster another generation of successful marine mammals. Contrast this to the scene that has played out in Oregon and Washington over the past decade. Men and women lacking the skills for actual jobs capture the animals, lock them in metal bars akin to those used to rape cows, sear the flesh of the animals with a number, the stench of burned skin and fur mixing with blood smoking through the air. The animals cry in agony... and are released. That's when the monitoring begins. It's almost like baseball... three strikes, and you're out. The only difference is that, for the poor pinnipeds, striking out is punished with a bullet to the brain, and the strikes are recorded any time they are observed......

     Picture the scene: it is June 2011. The UN and NATO have backed militants aimed at toppling the regime of longtime Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, which they ultimately succeed in that October. Peaceful protests being met with hails of bullets has resulted in widespread violence, and thousands lose their lives amidst a constant cacophony of bullets, mines, and mortars; so bad is the situation that no foreign civilian aircraft are allowed to fly over the Northern African nation. This is part of the Arab Spring, a wider discontent that also rocks Tunisia, Egypt, Morocco, Qatar, Bahrain, and virtually every other MENA country, albeit in relatively smaller ways. In the midst of all of this is a pair of ships, a trimaran and an old trawler refitted by volunteers. They're not here for war, unless the fight to save the bluefin tuna can be considered such.      They were attacked by pirates in the Gulf of Aden that May, but nonetheless persevere into the most...

       Please note that this paragraph serves only to provide context and not to delve into any social or political issues related to the United States and China. In May 2021, the United States combined dozens of bipartisan bills into a comprehensive legislative package called the U.S. Innovation and Competition Act, which aims to compete with China by codifying Made-in-America laws, bolstering cybersecurity, further sanctioning alleged human rights abuses in Tibet and Xinjiang, and more.      This law also aims to compete with China in terms of environmental protections. China and Hong Kong are, by far, the biggest consumers of shark fin soup and other products derived from the endangered elasmobranches. The United States, more likely on the grounds of punishing China than any concern for the sharks, it should be considered, included a ban on the import and export of shark fins in the United States in the USICA. 15 states have already banned it, shark...

     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 dec...

     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 "...

     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 ov...

     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...

     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....

     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...