The Sea Around Us project manager, Dr. Maria ‘Deng’ Palomares, with Belizean fishers. Photo by the Belize Fisheries Project.
Belizean fishers’ experience in the water confirms the declining trends in fishery catches – and, therefore, in fish populations – uncovered by the Belize Fisheries Project (BFP), of which the Sea Around Us is a member together with Comunidad y Biodiversidad (COBI), the Environmental Law Institute (ELI), Healthy Reefs for Healthy People Initiative (HRI) and MRAG Americas.
Black Snapper (or black and white snapper), Macolor niger at Gota Sorayer, Red Sea, Egypt. Photo by Derek Keats, Wikimedia Commons.
In a recent piece published in the journal PLOS Biology, the Sea Around Us alumna and NYU professor Jennifer Jacquet, and our principal investigator, Daniel Pauly, ponder the idea of wild fish and invertebrates being considered more like wild animals and less like tradable commodities.
Bluefin tuna. Image from Pxhere, CC0.
Bluefin tuna, swordfish and Atlantic mackerel are among the fish species considered commercially extinct or extirpated on the Turkish side of the Marmara and Black Seas.
A new study by researchers with the Sea Around Us initiative at the University of British Columbia, Mersea Marine Conservation Consulting, Turkey’s Central Fisheries Research Institute and the Institute of Marine Sciences and Management at the University of Istanbul, found that 17 fish species have been extirpated and 17 are commercially extinct in Turkey’s Black Sea, while 19 have been extirpated and 22 went commercially extinct in the Sea of Marmara.
Gulf grouper. Photo by Alfredo Barroso, Wikimedia Commons.
How much have humans affected the population of other species on the planet? A new methodology for documenting the cumulative human impacts on biodiversity aims to answer this question.
Dubbed EPOCH -for Evaluation of Population Change- the methodology was developed by a group of scientists from universities in Europe, Asia, and North America. It provides a standardized framework for organizing disperse data on individual species or populations of animals and plants that have been affected by urbanization, pollution, fishing, hunting, over-harvesting, and other anthropogenic activities.
The Sea Around Us Project Manager, Dr. Deng Palomares, wrote the below letter in support of FishBase, one of our project’s valued partners.
FishBase needs help and I am writing to you because you either have at one point or another requested data to be extracted from FishBase for your own research purposes or have contributed your own data to FishBase.