Fish Food 4 Thought

     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, ...