Port of Dakar. Photo by Garth Cripps ©, Coalition for Fisheries Transparency.
The decades-long overexploitation of the marine fisheries resources of most West African countries is one of the top drivers of illegal immigration to Europe via deadly routes through the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, and the Strait of Gibraltar.
Mogadishu’s fish market. Image by AMISOM Public Information, Wikimedia Commons.
Indian Ocean fisheries are vital for global nutrition as they provide 12 per cent of wild-caught seafood worldwide which, in turn, corresponds to nearly 30 per cent of all calcium from seafood, 20 per cent of vitamin A, 15 per cent of iron, and 13 per cent of vitamin B12.
Sea Around Us Research Associate, Dr. Vicky Lam, and MSc Student, Anna Luna Rossi, at UNOC 2025.
By Vicky Lam.
Nice, in southern France, is known for its stunning Mediterranean coastline, and it proved to be a fitting host city for the United Nations Ocean Conference (UNOC) 2025, held from June 9 to 13. With over 15,000 participants from around the world, the event brought together governments, scientists, NGOs, Indigenous leaders, and civil society to advance action to conserve and sustainably use the ocean.
The Sea Around Us MSc student, Anna Luna Rossi (fourth from the left), with her NGO Reserva colleagues and actress Auli’i Cravalho at UNOC 2025.
By Anna Luna Rossi.
June 2025 marked the third edition of the United Nations Ocean Conference, hosted in Nice, France, and co-organized by France and Costa Rica. UNOC3 falls within the Ocean Decade initiative to create a framework for communicating and using ocean knowledge to generate real-time actions for safeguarding our marine resources.
French President Emmanuel Macron, being interviewed at UNOC 2025. Image by France.TV.
During an interview with French national television, President Emmanuel Macron was confronted with images from David Attenborough’s Ocean documentary, which shows the gigantic nets of bottom trawlers operating in the Mediterranean dropping hundreds of tonnes of all kinds of fishes on a boat after razing the seafloor and everything in their way.
Sea Around Us data users interested in learning how to perform a catch reconstruction update now have access to a suite of free video tutorials.
The step-by-step guides, available in English with carefully curated subtitles in Arabic, Chinese, French, Indonesian, Italian, and Spanish (with more languages on the way), are presented in an easy-to-understand animated video format led by a researcher named Ola.
Bluefin tuna. Image by Tom Puchner, Flickr
Extractive activity in international waters – including fishing, seabed mining, and oil and gas exploitation – should be banned forever, according to top scientists.
The high seas, the vast international waters beyond national jurisdiction, cover 43 per cent of the planet’s surface and two-thirds of its living space. Yet they remain largely unprotected and increasingly threatened by overfishing, climate disruption and the rising interest in deep-sea mining.
Common carp. Photo by Aquatika Karlovac, FishBase
A widely debated topic in biology and fisheries sciences is the role of oxygen in the growth of fishes and other water-breathing animals. According to new research, developmental changes in individual fish and experimental errors are the causes of inconsistencies that have erroneously been linked to the Gill Oxygen Limitation Theory (GOLT), developed to explain the influence of oxygen uptake on fish growth.
The Sea Around Us initiative turned 25 years old in July 2024.
To mark this milestone, the team produced a large poster highlighting some of the research accomplishments that turned the project into a reputable voice when it comes to fisheries data, and fish population management and conservation.
Daniel Pauly at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, September 2024. Photo by Valentina Ruiz-Leotaud.
In the heat of summer in central Greece, the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki hosted the 22nd FishBase and SeaLifeBase Symposium.
Titled “Fishes in Changing Ecosystems,” the two-day event started on September 2, 2024, with a full day dedicated to some of the overarching themes the Sea Around Us team is doing research on.
Bottom trawling in the North Sea . Image by Ifremer.
The 4 billion tonnes of marine organisms that global fisheries extracted from the ocean between 1960 and 2018 resulted in the depletion of over 560 million tonnes of essential nutrients vital to ecosystem health, new research has found.
Artificial intelligence. Image by Mohamed Hassan, Pxhere.
Having spent a big portion of his professional career in the Global South, the Sea Around Us principal investigator, Dr. Daniel Pauly, quickly learned how difficult and onerous it is to access scientific literature in the region, even when working at renowned universities or institutes.
The effort that researchers working in countries outside North America, Europe and Australia have to make to write their dissertations, papers and other scientific contributions would be unimaginable for their peers in the Global North. From outdated library collections to poor bandwidth Internet connections, downloading a PDF of a recent publication for free with the click of a few buttons is unheard of in many places. If payment and delivery are required, then the task may become even more difficult.
Australian Parvancorina minchami life restoration at MUSE – Science Museum in Trento, Italy. Image by Matteo De Stefano, Wikimedia Commons.
The growth and lifespan of Parvancorina minchami, small anchor-shaped animals that lived on the seafloor about 550 million years ago, resemble that of current marine invertebrates like golden shrimp and Baltic clam.
New research by a team at the Russian Academy of Sciences, Harvard University and the Sea Around Us initiative at the University of British Columbia shows that P. minchami’s longevity was about four years, that they could reach close to 20 millimetres in length, and that their pace of growth was similar to that of small recent invertebrates.
As of 2025, about 75 per cent of the Sea Around Us team is comprised of women and in the past 25 years, of the over 200 people from more than 40 countries who have worked for the project, 59 per cent have been women.
Crystal clear water in the Maldives. Photo by wardyboy400, Wikimedia Commons.
The Sea Around Us initiative at the University of British Columbia and ProtectedSeas Navigator, a free, interactive map of marine regulatory information worldwide, have partnered to expand users’ access to marine protected area (MPA) information.
William N. Eschmeyer and his Catalog of Fishes. Images by the California Academy of Sciences.
By Daniel Pauly, Rainer Froese and Nicolas Bailly.
The Quantitative Aquatics and Sea Around Us teams lament the passing of W.N ‘Bill’ Eschmeyer (1939-2024), the founding editor and namesake of the Eschmeyer’s Catalog of Fishes (ECoF).
