Whiting is among the demersal fish found in the eastern North Atlantic Ocean. Photo by Borut Furlan, taken from the website of our sister project FishBase.
Fish that live on or near the seafloor -known as demersal or groundfish- barely feel the impact of marine heatwaves, according to new research that highlights the need to keep seas from warming further.
Small-scale fisheries catches in Socotra, an archipelago that belongs to Yemen and is located off the north-eastern tip of Africa in the western Indian Ocean, reached an all-time high of 12,000 tonnes in 2000, declined to about 3,300 tonnes by 2014 and then slightly increased to 3,700 tonnes by 2019.
Sardines at the Rameswaram fishing port in India. Image by Rudolph A. Furtado, Wikimedia Commons
Indian Ocean marine fisheries catches have been consistently rising since the 1950s, a recent study by researchers with the Sea Around Us – Indian Ocean initiative at the University of Western Australia shows. This contrasts with global trends.
Daniel Pauly presenting before the European Parliament, January 24, 2023. Photo by Anton Kuech, Twitter
The Sea Around Us Principal Investigator, Dr. Daniel Pauly, and Project Manager, Dr. Maria ‘Deng’ Palomares, participated in a session of the European Parliament’s Committee on Fisheries on January 24, 2023, to answer questions related to the report Role and impact of China on world fisheries and aquaculture.
A simple fish stock assessment model applied to over 500 years of catch data demonstrated that if Canadian authorities had allowed for the rebuilding of the stock of northern Atlantic cod off Newfoundland and Labrador in the 1980s, annual catches of about 200,000 tonnes could have been sustained.