Silver-cheeked
toadfish Lagocephalus
sceleratus, a poisonous invasive
species thriving in the Eastern Mediterranean Sea since the mid-2000s after it
crossed the Suez Canal from the Red Sea, is now reaching monstrous sizes around
the Greek islands near the Turkish coast.
By Daniel Pauly.
Jeffrey Hutchings, a friend, colleague and mentor to many at the Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries, passed away in late January 2022 at 63 years of age. His eulogy in the Globe and Mail emphasized that he “firmly believed in the value of ensuring that public-policy decisions are guided by unbiased research.”[1]
Atlantic cod (Gadus morhua) is among the fish species maturing and spawning earlier in the “spring” reproductive season, due to higher water temperature. Photo by GRID-Arendal, Flickr.
Fisheries managers and researchers may now predict how early fish will spawn in response to warming waters due to climate change, both in the oceans and in freshwaters.
Dr. Daniel Pauly is known these days as the world’s most cited fisheries scientist and the whistleblower who alerted the public about the devastation caused to marine ecosystems by the global fishing industry.
He is the mind behind the idea of the shifting baselines syndrome, which explains how knowledge of environmental disaster fades over time, leading to a misguided understanding of change on our planet, and the fishing down marine food webs concept, which describes how in certain parts of the ocean, fisheries have depleted large predatory fish and are increasingly catching smaller – and previously spurned – species lower in the food web.