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Facing extinction- African penguin- Photo by David Grémillet.

Industrial fisheries are starving seabirds all around the world

Facing extinction- African penguin- Photo by David Grémillet.

Facing extinction- African penguin- Photo by David Grémillet.

Industrial fisheries are starving seabirds like penguins and terns by competing for the same prey sources, new research from the French National Center for Scientific Research in Montpellier and the Sea Around Us initiative at the University of British Columbia has found.

In a study published today in Current Biology, researchers found that annual seabird food consumption decreased from 70 to 57 million tonnes between 1970 and 2010. Meanwhile, fisheries increased their catches of potential seabird prey from an average of 59 million tonnes in the 1970s and 80s to 65 million tonnes per year in recent years.

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Photo by ILO.

Modern slavery promotes overfishing

Labour abuses, including modern slavery, are ‘hidden subsidies’ that allow distant-water fishing fleets to remain profitable and promote overfishing, new research from the University of Western Australia and the Sea Around Us initiative at the University of British Columbia has found.

By combining fisheries data from the Sea Around Us initiative at UBC with country-level data on modern slavery, the researchers found that countries whose fleets rely heavily on government subsidies, fish far away from home ports, and fail to comprehensively report their actual catch, tend to fish beyond sustainable limits and are at higher risk of labour abuses.

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Photo by WWF.

Nothing natural about nature’s steep decline: WWF report reveals staggering extent of human impact, including that of fisheries, on planet

Photo by WWF.

Photo by WWF.

Humanity and the way we feed, fuel and finance our societies and economies are pushing nature and the services that power and sustain us to the brink, according to WWF’s Living Planet Report 2018. The report, released today, presents a sobering picture of the impact of human activity on the world’s wildlife, forests, oceans, rivers and climate, underlining the rapidly closing window for action and the urgent need for the global community to collectively rethink and redefine how we value, protect and restore nature.

The Living Planet Report 2018 presents a comprehensive overview of the state of our natural world, twenty years after the flagship report was first published. Through indicators such as the Living Planet Index (LPI) provided by the Zoological Society of London, the Species Habitat Index (SHI), the IUCN Red List Index (RLI), the Biodiversity Intactness Index (BII) and the Sea Around Us fisheries data, as well as Planetary Boundaries and the Ecological Footprint, the report paints a singular disturbing picture: human activity is pushing the planet’s natural systems that support life on earth to the edge.

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Dr. Deng Palomares. Photo by Valentina Ruiz Leotaud.

Frontiers awards the Sea Around Us Project Manager

Dr. Deng Palomares. Photo by Valentina Ruiz Leotaud.

Dr. Deng Palomares. Photo by Valentina Ruiz Leotaud.

The Sea Around Us Project Manager, Dr. Deng Palomares, received an award that praises her efforts as Specialty Chief Editor for Frontiers in Marine Science.

Granted by the journal’s Community Support Fund, the award acts as a positive acknowledgment of the impact of Dr. Palomares’ initiative to maintain a vibrant Marine Fisheries and Aquaculture section, as well as of her incessant work in encouraging scientists to submit their papers and boosting the overall growth of Frontiers.

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Photo by Magda Ehlers, Pexels.

Become a Forrest Scholar while studying for your PhD with the Sea Around Us – Indian Ocean

Photo by Magda Ehlers, Pexels.

Photo by Magda Ehlers, Pexels.

The Sea Around Us – Indian Ocean, based at the University of Western Australia under the lead of Professor Dirk Zeller, is looking for outstanding PhD candidates interested in conducting ‘big-data’ research on fisheries and fisheries conservation issues at the ocean-basin scale or on Indian Ocean Rim countries.

If this is of interest to you, then consider applying for the Forrest Research Foundation Scholarship program, which is open to domestic (i.e., Australian) and international applicants. The round for 2019 PhD students opened on September 10, 2018 and closes midnight Western Australian Time (GMT +8) on Wednesday, October 31, 2018.

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