The looming extinction of the Maui dolphin

Maui’s dolphin. Photo by New Zealand Department of Conservation, Flickr

The world’s rarest and smallest known subspecies of dolphin, the Maui dolphin, is about to go extinct. Its population is down to 60 individuals from 2,000 in the 1970s.

Journalist Christopher Pala just launched a series of articles focusing on the reasons behind the disappearance of this subspecies of the Hector’s dolphin and the actions governments are taking (or not) to stop the death toll from rising.

Follow this link to read the first article of the series in Science.

Why did FAO choose to ignore the existence and trends of the reconstructed catch data?

Marine Policy recently published “Comments on FAOs State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture (SOFIA 2016),” authored by the Sea Around Us leaders Drs. Daniel Pauly and Dirk Zeller.

Both scientists expressed their concern over the implications for resource management and global food security of ignoring information aimed at filling the gaps that exist in the data reported by countries to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

They divide their observations into a few main points:

VIDEO: How much is fished in your country’s waters?

Photo by Alper Çuğun, Flickr.

Trawl nets, drift nets, longlines, etc. have allowed fleets across the world to turn their fishing operations into massive extractive activities.

In several countries’ Exclusive Economic Zones, such expansion has led to depleted fish stocks. Some of those countries, however, have enough capital to buy access to other countries’ waters, extract their resources and sell them across continents. “They are just exporting the problem,” the Sea Around Us Senior Scientist Dirk Zeller has said.

WATCH THE VIDEO TUTORIAL

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Developing love for fishery data

Ar’ash Tavakolie

Ar’ash Tavakolie

At some point in his life after having been in Vancouver for a few years and being done with his Ph.D. at UBC, Ar’ash Tavakolie really wanted to join an organization working to make the world a better place.

He wanted, of course, to put his engineering and machine-learning skills to good use, so he was looking for a place where data processing and knowledge creation were the focal points. That is how he landed, a decade ago, at the Sea Around Us. “The fact that it was in marine conservation also encouraged me. I felt I could pay my dues to the environment,” he says with a smile.

Ar’ash loves that, through the collaborative work he was doing with the Sea Around Us team, he was able to help spread the word about how much countries are (over)fishing and the dangerous situation in which fisheries are putting the world’s fish stocks.

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