The Missing Fish


The trailer for a new documentary about Danial Pauly and the Sea Around Us has just been released.

Produced by the Living Oceans Foundation, the documentary — “The Missing Fish” —  traces Pauly’s mission to understand and study global fish catch.

Travelling to different areas of the world, from Senegal to Newfoundland to Nicaragua, Pauly and a team of researches piece together data that are not included by countries in their official reports.

The documentary will be released by summer — check out the trailer here!

Sea Around Us study finds 30 per cent of global fish catch is unreported

Fish basket on head
Countries drastically underreport the number of fish caught worldwide, and the numbers obscure a significant decline in the total catch .

The new estimate, released today in Nature Communications, puts the annual global catch at roughly 109 million metric tons, about 30 per cent higher than the 77 million officially reported in 2010 by more than 200 countries and territories. This means that 32 million metric tons of fish goes unreported every year, more than the weight of the entire population of the United States.

Researchers led by the Sea Around Us, a research initiative at the University of British Columbia supported by The Pew Charitable Trusts, and Vulcan Inc., attribute the discrepancy to the fact that most countries focus their data collection efforts on industrial fishing and largely exclude difficult-to-track categories such as artisanal, subsistence, and illegal fishing, as well as discarded fish. Continue reading →

Nation of Palau protecting 80 percent of its ocean waters

(Photo: LuxTonnerre/Flickr)

(Photo: LuxTonnerre/Flickr)

Midway through December, 2015, the Pacific Island nation of Palau created a marine protected area (MPA) the size of California, helping to conserve tuna populations and a host of other marine species.

“We will not restore the health of our planet without repairing the well-being of the ocean,“ wrote Tommy E Remengesau Jr. – Palau’s president – in a column in The Guardian newspaper. Continue reading →